As April heats up and that midnight-on-the-15th deadline approaches, even the most civic-minded of us can end up feeling stressed and crabby about taxes. A quarter of households (like mine) will procrastinate until the last two weeks to take care of a task that can feel like an annual headache. As odd as it may sound in this context, reframing those tax forms as an opportunity to count your personal blessings and America’s blessings might be a mental health lifesaver.
Research shows that deliberately counting blessings or keeping “gratitude lists” has a host of mental health benefits, and cultivating a habit of gratitude reduces negative affect like resentment, irritability, stress, and depression.
My cousin Robyn is a hard-working mother of three whose joints don’t function as well as they once did. In fact, they hurt. A lot. The day-to-day can be a challenge, and most people in her situation do a fair bit of grumbling. But Robyn recently posted on Facebook: Lord, I thank You for dirty clothes, muddy shoes, messy rooms, a dusty house, tired legs, aching knees, and taxes. I thank You that I have clothes, shoes, a room to make a mess in, a house to get dirty, legs that work, knees that bend and a free country in which I can pay taxes.
Her words transported me all the way back to my childhood, to the 1962 tract house where I shared a room with two sisters, and a bathroom with another two brothers, and kitchen chores with the whole family – except that left of the kitchen sink was frequently stacked high with items waiting to be scrubbed, and the drainer seemed always full. But on the other side of the sink, attached to the upper cabinet, was a little sign that read, “Thank God for dirty dishes; they have a tale to tell; while others may be hungry; we’re eating very well. . . .” As a short child up to my elbows in soapy water, I liked the sign and I liked washing dishes, and I still like them both – most of the time – to this day.
I first broadened my appreciation from dirty dishes to taxes on a trip to Guatemala. My husband and I were winding our way up unpaved mountain roads in a “retired” American school bus, three to a seat, knees to our chests, on our way to language school in the highland village of Todos Santos. As the bus ground around gullies and erosion and potholes, it struck me, rather hard, that we get something for our tax money. The thought struck again when, once settled with a village family, we visited the local grade school. There, children were attempting to learn math, reading and writing without such basics as textbooks and paper, let alone the brightly colored posters and media and other learning tools I had taken for granted as a child. I’ve had a Canadian attitude toward taxes ever since (well, at least when my better self is in charge).
The Guatemalan roads and school may have brought the pattern into focus, but really, it was my parents who sketched the lines. If any bunch of five kids were primed to appreciate the bounty that we Americans share and that our taxes sustain, it was us. Public school classrooms that did have books and paper gave way each spring to summers spent traversing the interstate highway system, hiking, and sleeping in state parks, and poking through small-town museums and stretching out on picnic benches in a roadside rest stops. We saw astounding wonders – the Grand Canyon and the Mississippi River, Carlsbad Caverns, the Badlands – and got our heads filled with history at old monuments like Montezuma’s Castle and the Vicksburg Civil War cemetery. We slogged single file in scruffy boots up Pikes Peak and through Maroon Bells wilderness, with backpacks on, and eventually learned to love it.
As a teen, I read a book called Mama’s Bank Account about a Norwegian immigrant family scraping by in San Francisco at the turn of the century. Week after week, in the story, they carefully count out money to cover expenses, and the mother comments how good it is that they don’t have to take money from their bank account. Only after the children are grown do they find that the bank account doesn’t exist; Mama has made it up to give them a sense of security and prosperity. For me as a child, the delicious knowledge that I was a part-owner, albeit a very small shareholder, in America the Beautiful was my equivalent of Mama’s bank account. When life felt overwhelming, I imagined those highways and parks, familiar and beautiful, all places I was allowed to be because I had been born in the Land of the Free. To this day, when I travel to other countries, and natural wonders like caves or geysers are fenced off with private property signs and exorbitant entry fees, the child in me protests: But, but they’re supposed to belong to everyone!
As one who has received so many benefits from this country, it pains me sometimes how much of our national conversation is about taxes. It’s like going into a department store where the merchandise is all hidden behind enormous price tags. Our representatives spend so much time quarreling about who’s going to carry what share of the tax “burden,” that there’s no time left for the dish-washing, mess-scrubbing, everyday work that it takes to keep our communities great. We get so ground down from fighting with each other that we have a hard time coming together to ask the important questions: What do we want for our children? What do we want for our community? What do we want for our country? We put so much emotional energy into nursing resentment about those so-called “burdens” that we sometimes forget how astoundingly much we have received, both from those who came before us and from this extraordinary land of purple mountains and spacious skies.
Robyn’s Facebook prayer and my mother’s sign both were notes to self. They were small acts of commitment to living deliberately in a sense of bounty and gratitude, even when knees are sore and hands are chapped and the housekeeping seems endless. Affirmations like theirs get us out of our normal way of thinking and focus us on life’s goodness, and they have clear health and mental health benefits for us and people around us. Cultivating gratitude leads to better sleep, greater goal attainment, better relationships, more mutual support, and a stronger love life.
Gratitude as a life posture or a sense of being “blessed” is something that religious people talk about mostly in church and secular people like me, who have given up that traditional forum and vocabulary, mostly keep to ourselves. But Robyn, in her note, did an interesting thing. By adding taxes to her list, she crossed a boundary. Not the boundary between church and state – that one’s been crossed plenty of late – but the boundary between civic life and spiritual life. I wonder what it would it mean for our country if more of us said, to a God or to the universe: “I thank You that I have roads to maintain, schoolbooks to buy, a sewer to mend, rivers and mountains to protect and a free country in which I can pay taxes.”
Valerie Tarico is a psychologist. She is the author of ‘Trusting Doubt: A Former Evangelical Looks at Old Beliefs in a New Light.” She is also the founder of WisdomCommons.org.
C2C Fellows / National Climate Seminar / Bard 04.02.13
Dear friends and colleagues,
This Wednesday at noon eastern on The National Climate Seminar, Katharine Wilkinson will discuss her book Between God and Green: How Evangelicals are Cultivating a Middle Ground on Climate Change. What is the source of this unexpected support for climate action? Is this a growing movement, or was it a “2008 moment”? Can creation care create space for conservative politicians to engage on climate?
Join us for this important conversation. Send advance questions for Dr. Wilkinson to climate@bard.edu. If you can’t make it live, all National Climate Seminar conversations are available as podcasts 24 hour after the calls.
In two weeks we have a National Climate Seminar EXTRAVAGANZA, with a 4/17 evening webinar featuring 350.org Executive Director, May Boeve, Island President Director Jon Shenk, and Thilmeeza Hussain, former UN Representative from the Maldives. The webinar is part of our National Conversation on Democracy and Climate. It follows a nationwide screening of The Island President. I include my Grist review of this amazing film below. Here’s the punchline:
“This is the best film dealing with global warming in years. It is a story of classical proportion: of true heroism, courage and nobility, of eloquent soliloquy, of intimate moments, and of political intrigue, compromise, and betrayal.”
The focus for the day is on the link between democracy and climate justice. With the US political system awash in fossil fuel money, the link holds as true in the United States as it does in the Maldives. Close to 100 colleges, universities, faith and community groups are participating. You can still sign up here to host a screening, and to participate in the interactive discussion!
And finally, it’s not too late to sign up for our final C2C Fellows Leadership training of the spring, in Portland Oregon over the weekend of April 12-14. Please spread the word to undergrads and recent grads aspiring to sustainability leadership in policy, politics and business! Applications are due April 5th.
Thanks for the work you are doing,
Eban Goodstein
Director, Bard CEP & Director, Bard MBA in Sustainability
===================================================================================== Triumph, tragedy, and climate change:
“A cross between paradise and paradise.” This is how Mohammed Nasheed of the Maldives describes his nation in Jon Shenk’s powerful new film, The Island President.
Shenk follows President Nasheed over a one-year period, leading up to the Copenhagen climate summit, in a beautiful, courageous, and strangely hopeful story. The film resonates all the more deeply following last month’s coup in the Maldives. The story’s ending — perhaps tragic, perhaps a powerful continuation — is today unfolding in real time.
The Maldives is a string of 2,000 islands off the coast of India, home to about 300,000 people. The highest point in the country is only a few feet above sea level. Until 2008, the islands had been under dictatorial rule for decades.
After returning home from college in Britain, in the late ’80s, Nasheed became an activist for democratic reform. He was imprisoned 12 times, and tortured, enduring 18 months of solitary confinement. In 2008, he led the nation to free and fair elections, winning the presidency.
Shenk, with unprecedented access to a head of state, films a year-long journey of this charismatic, newly elected president. With climate change a clear and present threat to the very existence of his nation, Nasheed begins speaking out globally, and passionately, for all those on the front line of climate change. Finally, he arrives in Copenhagen to play a pivotal role in crafting a global climate deal in 2009.
This is the best film dealing with global warming in years. It is a story of classical proportion: of true heroism, courage and nobility, of eloquent soliloquy, of intimate moments, and of political intrigue, compromise, and betrayal.
The film is also visually stunning. The vast blue ocean is both a serene paradise, and a powerful, threatening force, driving Nasheed’s political urgency. The Maldives capital, Malé, looks like an oasis of buildings rising out of the ocean. When asked by a reporter what was his plan B, should there be no action to slow global warming, Nasheed responds, “We will die.”
Shenk follows Nasheed in strategy sessions with his cabinet as the team seeks to leverage their moral argument as the first victims of climate change, canaries in the coal mine. Nasheed gives speeches, and makes his case with heads of states and ministers at the U.K. Parliament, at the U.N. General Assembly, in India, and finally — during the dark, crushing days of Copenhagen.
I won’t spoil the ending, though it does surprise. I will say that this is a movie for a post-Copenhagen world. Copenhagen put a brutal end to a naïve view that the leaders of the world, pushed forward by a moral imperative, would overcome petty domestic politics and sign an enforceable deal to cut global emissions by 80 percent over the next 40 years. Instead, the meeting advanced a new framework of what could be a race to the top, anchored by national commitments, and driven by domestic political organizing, in the U.S., China, India, Europe, and Brazil.
This approach will be insufficient to save the people of the Maldives. But it is a start, and we are not done yet.
Last month, just after I screened the movie, President Nasheed was forced at gunpoint to resign from his office. Political opponents seized on the economic crisis and fundamentalists objections to Nasheed’s modernizing Islam. At clear and ongoing risk to his life, Nasheed decided to remain in the country, writing, speaking, leading marches, and fighting for democracy.
And this is the enduring lesson from the movie. President Nasheed and thousands of others in the Maldives understand that their land and lives are threatened both by the rising seas, and by the corrupt politics of business as usual. They continue to fight for both democracy and climate justice, in the face of imprisonment, beating, torture, and murder.
Back here in the U.S., there is no outside force stopping any one of us from declaring our candidacy to run as a clean energy/clean money candidate, for mayor, or city council, or the state legislature or Congress. There is nothing stopping us from starting a green team in our business or workplace, and driving sustainability changes there from the ground up.
And maybe, like this island president, we don’t win the first time, and maybe our victories are followed by setbacks. Nevertheless, action at this scale, sustained, by all of us, is what must happen to change the future.
New York City, says Nasheed, is no higher than the Maldives. A cross between paradise and paradise: this is where each of us lives, and that we all must defend. Check out the screening schedule (theislandpresident.com/see-film/) to find out if The Island President is coming to your town soon.
Mohamed Nasheed is a Maldivian politician and one of the founders of the Maldivian Democratic Party, who served as the fourth President of the Maldives from 2008 to 2012. Wikipedia
Climate Seminar calls are Wednesdays at 12pm EST and held twice monthly via conference call. Assign the half-hour calls to your students for a chance to hear top scientists, analysts, and political leaders discuss climate and clean energy solutions. Have questions for the speakers? Email them beforehand or during the call to climate@bard.edu.
Date Presenter Conversation
Feb. 6 Daniel Lashof, Director, Climate and Clean Air Program, NRDC Cutting Carbon at Power Plants
Feb. 20 Mike Tidwell, Chesapeake Climate Action Network Offshore Wind: Potential &Politics
Mar. 6 Brenda Ekwurzel,Climate Scientist, Union of Concerned Scientists After Sandy, What Next?
Mar. 20 Mark Reynolds, Executive Director, Citizens Climate Lobby Lobbyists for Climate Action
Apr. 3 Katharine Wilkinson, Author, Between God and Green Between God and Green
Apr. 17 Bill McKibben*, Author, Educator, Environmentalist, 350.org Corruption, Democracy, Climate
May 1 Manuel Pastor and James Boyce, University of Southern Cal., University of Mass. Co-Benefits and Climate Justice
It’s horrific! A Maldives court just sentenced a 15-year-old rape survivor to 100 whip lashings. By threatening Maldives politicians’ precious tourist income we can save this child and stop these outrageous floggings. Let’s quickly build a massive outcry, then place ads in travel magazines and websites:
It’s hard to believe, but a 15-year-old rape survivor has been sentenced to be whipped 100 times in public! Let’s put an end to this lunacy by hitting the Maldives government where it hurts: the tourism industry.
The girl’s stepfather is accused of raping her for years and murdering the baby she bore. Now the court says she must be flogged for “sex outside marriage”! President Waheed of the Maldives is already feeling global pressure on this, and we can force him to save this girl and change the law to spare other victims this cruel fate. This is how we can end the War on Women – by standing up every time an outrage like this happens.
Tourism is the big earner for the Maldives elite, including government ministers. Let’s build a massive petition to President Waheed this week, then threaten the islands’ reputation through hard-hitting ads in travel magazines and online until he steps in to save her and abolish this outrageous law. Sign the petition and forward this email to everyone:
The Maldives is a paradise for tourists. But for women there, it can be hell. Under harsh interpretations of sharia law, women and children are routinely punished with flogging and house arrest if found guilty of extramarital sex or adultery. It’s nearly always the women who get punished, not the perpetrators. A staggering one in three women between ages 15 and 49 have suffered physical or sexual abuse — yet zero rapists were convicted in the past three years.
Winning this battle can help women everywhere, as the Maldives government is right now running for a top UN human rights position – on a platform of women’s rights! Global outrage has already forced President Waheed to appeal the sentence in the 15-year-old’s case. But that’s not enough. Extremists inside the country will force him to abandon further reforms if international attention fades. Let’s tell the Maldives that it stands to lose its reputation as a romantic tourist hot spot unless it changes its attitudes to and laws about women.
If enough of us raise our voices, we can get President Waheed and his MPs to face down the extremists. The president is already on the back foot over this shameful, tragic story – let’s seize this moment to prevent more horrifying injustices against girls and women. Sign the petition, then send this email widely:
Avaaz members have fought many battles in the global war on women. In Afghanistan, we helped protect a young woman who bravely spoke out about her horrific rape; in Honduras, we fought alongside local women against a law that would jail women using the morning-after pill. Let’s now protect the women of the Maldives.
With hope and determination,
Jeremy, Mary, Nick, Alex, Ricken, Laura, Michelle and the whole Avaaz team
MORE INFORMATION
Maldives girl to get 100 lashes for pre-marital sex (BBC) www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-21595814
Maldives government to appeal flogging of rape victim (Dawn, Pakistan) dawn.com/2013/03/01/maldives-government-to-appeal-flogging-of-rape-victim/
Rape victims punished, failed by Maldives justice system (Minivan news, Maldives) minivannews.com/society/raped-victims-punished-failed-by-law-in-the-maldives-53760
Judicial statistics show 90 percent of those convicted for fornication are female (Minivan news, Maldives) minivannews.com/politics/judicial-statistics-show-90-percent-of-those-convicted-for-fornication-are-female-44605
TPP foe: A protester holds a sign reading ‘We oppose Japan’s participation in the TPP talks’ during a Thursday rally in Tokyo against the Trans-Pacific Partnership accord. | AP
After taking time to lay the groundwork amid pressure from lobby groups and lawmakers from rural constituencies, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe formally announced Friday that Japan will join the Trans-Pacific Partnership free-trade talks.
Abe’s government also unveiled its estimate of the possible economic impacts of joining the trade initiative, showing Japan’s participation would drive up its gross domestic product by 0.66 percent, or around ¥3.2 trillion, but that production in the farm, fishery and forestry sectors could decrease by ¥3 trillion annually if all tariffs are abolished unconditionally.
“The TPP is turning the Pacific Ocean into an inland sea and a huge economic zone,” Abe told reporters at his office.
As 11 member countries have already spent the last three years deciding rules to free up trade, services and investment in the Pacific Rim, Japan needs to actively engage in the talks to make them as advantageous as possible for the country, Abe said.
“This is the last chance. If we miss this opportunity, it would immediately mean that we would be left out of setting global regulations” on free trade, he said. “If Japan becomes only inward-looking, there will no longer be a chance of economic growth.”
At the same time, Abe admitted that “it will be difficult to overturn rules already set” by the 11 TPP member countries in past rounds of talks. But he also stressed that he will defend the nation’s interests throughout the discussions, which are scheduled to end by December, in particular by mitigating the negative impact on the domestic agriculture and fisheries industries.
He declined to answer whether Japan would withdraw from the discussions if it fails to persuade the other TPP members to allow existing tariffs on rice, pork, beef, wheat, dairy products and sugar to continue, as demanded earlier by Abe’s own Liberal Democratic Party.
“We will negotiate based on the national interests. Commenting on whether to withdraw (from the TPP) at this point won’t serve that purpose,” he said.
Still, Abe’s LDP administration faces an uphill battle with time running out for Japan to negotiate any exemptions — especially in the key areas of rice, sugar and dairy products — with the other 11 TPP member states, making it more difficult for Tokyo to exert much leverage and ensure the minimum damage to the domestic agriculture industry.
The founding members of the TPP talks have been hammering out a framework for the regional accord since 2010, and their number has swelled to 11 countries, including the United States, Canada, Australia, Mexico, Singapore, New Zealand and Peru.
With little information available to nonmember nations, many are worried that Japan is taking its place at the table far too late if it hopes to amend agreements already settled by the current TPP participants.
“If (Japan) wants to take part in the talks, it needs to obey our ‘dress code,’ which has been already decided,” an official of one of the 11 countries reportedly said.
Led by the United States, the TTP members finished the 16th round of talks covering 21 trade and service areas Thursday in Singapore, and aim to reach a final agreement by the end of the year.
Japan’s participation requires the prior approval of every other TPP member, a process that is expected to take until mid-June to complete. That means the earliest opportunity for Japan to enter the fray could be a round of talks eyed for July, giving Abe’s government less than six months to negotiate any tariff exemptions before the final accord is inked.
But failing to join the regional trade zone would still be too big a risk for Japan to run, according to Abe and many experts.
The combined gross domestic product of the 11 TPP countries comes to around $21 trillion (around ¥2 quadrillion) and if Japan’s nearly $6 trillion (roughly ¥575 trillion) GDP is included, the bloc would account for 40 percent of total global economic output.
Yorizumi Watanabe, a former trade negotiator at the Foreign Ministry who is now a professor at Keio University, said Japan’s accession to the TPP is critical because it is likely to become a key platform for Asia-Pacific countries in setting rules for cross-border trade and services.
The Doha Round of tariff elimination talks at the World Trade Organization has remained stalled for years, he said, making it even more likely the TPP framework will serve as a template for future free-trade accords.
And with China and a number of other key economies showing interest in joining the TPP, Japan’s presence will be essential not only for its firms that are trying to tap overseas markets but also for those seeking to build production bases abroad, Watanabe said, adding, “It’s a big opportunity. Japan has wasted the past three years (by not joining the TPP talks).”
That said, the damage to Japan’s agricultural sector is likely to be equally substantial.
Prompted by farm lobbies, the LDP on Thursday adopted a resolution demanding Abe’s government prioritize the exclusion of rice, wheat, beef, pork and sugar from tariff exemptions in the TPP discussions.
Farmers argue that maintaining the current level of output is vital to ensure the nation can produce the minimum food supply that would be necessary in times of severe emergencies, such as wars or global food shortages.
Opening up rice and other sectors to foreign imports would devastate rural economies and communities, but Japan’s agricultural industry already seems to be dying a slow death despite the current protections against foreign products.
According to the Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries Ministry, the average age of the nation’s 2.6 million farmers stood at 65.9 as of 2011, and most of them lacked successors. The farm industry, meanwhile, accounted for just 1 percent of Japan’s GDP that year.
“Rice consumption came to 12 million tons in 1994, but it has shrunk to 8 million tons at present,” said Kazuhito Yamashita, a former farm ministry official who now serves as research director of the Canon Institute for Global Studies. “(Agricultural) production will further shrink because of the aging society and decreasing population numbers.
“Japan will no longer be able to maintain its farm industry (at its current level). Everybody is aware of that.”
Yamashita also argued that Japan, if necessary, could still protect its farmers by providing them with direct payments if tariffs against foreign produce are scrapped. A similar policy has been adopted by many other major industrialized countries and is widely considered acceptable in a free-trade agreement like the TPP, he said.
To survive, some domestic farmers will need to begin exporting high-quality produce overseas, Yamashita argued, adding that in that sense, Japan’s participation in the TPP is essential.
Kyodo Graphic – How Participation in TPP may impact Japan – just click on to see it.
My name is Mikaele Maiava. I’m writing from the Pacific Island archipelago of Tokelau to ask you to join with us in action as we take on the fossil fuel industry.
Last October, Tokelau turned off the last of its diesel generators. In their place, we switched on our solar plants, making Tokelau the first country in the world to become 100% renewably-powered.
I woke up before sunrise that day, excited about the history Tokelau was making. My whole village made its way to the site of over 100 solar panels — we could see the many hours of hard labor that had gone into this project. As we counted down to the switch, I could feel future generations smiling at us and thanking us. Our children’s future suddenly looked brighter because we had the vision (and perseverance) necessary to get off fossil fuels and switch to 100% renewable energy.
You might wonder why we bothered. Aren’t we doomed to lose our islands from sea-level rise? I don’t blame you for thinking that if you did. So often the global media victimises the Pacific Islands and portrays us as helplessly succumbing to climate change and rising seas. But the global media know nothing of who we really are, or how it feels to live on these paradise islands we call home. They don’t know that as Pacific Islanders, we are warriors, and that the land we live on is part of us.
We know that the longer the fossil fuel industry gets its way, the worse climate change will be, and the more sea-level rise will threaten our islands. But giving up on our home is not an option. We are not drowning.
We are fighting.
That’s why on March 2nd, Pacific Islanders across 15 diverse nations will be mobilising at prominent locations to perform our unique war challenges, songs, and dances. We’ll be laying down a challenge to the fossil fuel industry. It is their coal and oil and gas vs. our future. They cannot both coexist. And it is our future that has to win.
We want to show the world that people from countries and cultures everywhere are standing with us — the Pacific Warriors — in the fight against climate change.
Press Conference held inside the UN with access to the room available only to those the UN calls PRESS, and allows in by means of a stranglehold on the process of Media Accreditation. As such, the many websites belonging to environmental media are not part of this process.No wonder that the outside world is hardly provided information on subjects like this one. Non Member-State government-backed media does not stand a chance under such scrutiny.
Department of Public Information • News and Media Division • New York
Press Conference on Impact of Climate Change on Marshall Islands.
The Security Council should consider climate change as a threat to international peace and security, particularly for such low-lying nations as the Marshall Islands whose “very existence” was at risk, a Government minister from that country said at a Headquarters press conference today.
“This organization [the Council] that we put faith in to provide the security of our country is saying that that is not a security matter,” said Tony deBrum, Minister in Assistance to the President of the Marshall Islands, as he briefed journalists on today’s so-called “Arria Formula” meeting on security implications of climate change.
Initiated in 1992 by Ambassador Diego Arria, the representative of Venezuela on the Security Council, such informal gatherings do not constitute an activity of the Council and are convened at the initiative of a member or members of the Council.
Mr. deBrum said he had participated as a panelist and reminded the Council that 35 years ago, he had come to the United Nations to petition for the independence of the Marshall Islands. Between 1976 and 1986, his delegation had annually visited the United Nations. In 1986, the Security Council finally approved the termination of the trusteeship and the establishment of an independent Government for the Marshall Islands, he added.
“We are very grateful for that, but it is hard to be excited about the independent Government seeking prosperity, progress and good life for its people to be faced with the situation where its very existence is threatened through climate change,” he said.
“It seems ironic that the very same agency whose approval was needed for my country to become a country again would consider my coming back to ask for help […] is not relevant to their work,” he said. There was no outcome document or a running record from that meeting, but he expected that his appeal had convinced some or more of the participants that climate change “is in fact a security issue, not just an economic/social/political issue”.
When asked which countries opposed treating climate change as the Council’s prerogative, he said China, Russian Federation and Guatemala were among them. “Surprisingly”, the “Group of 77” developing countries and China, of which the Marshall Islands was a member, had taken a position that the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was the appropriate venue for deliberations on that issue. That revealed that “many of our own friends throughout the world do not realize the urgency of the problem,” he said.
Describing the situation, he said rising tides had started severely impacting the islands, with roads inundated every 14 days in keeping with the moon cycle. In southern parts of the nation, where there used to be a military base in the Second World War, ordnances were being exposed by the tides, presenting a clear danger to the life and welfare of people there. Even the nation’s capital was required to ration water. In the northern part, emergency kits for making drinking water were being distributed as well water was inundated with salt.
“It became unsuitable for human consumption, and dangerous even to our staple food and citrus,” he said. He said he was not predicting a looming crisis — it was already happening, affecting not just his own country but also Kiribati, Tuvalu and some of the other low-lying islands of the Pacific.
He hoped that “logic will prevail and people see it as a just cause”.
In September, there will be a Pacific Islands Forum meeting to be held in his country, he said. He wished to invite the most significant players in the politics of climate change to visit the Marshall Islands to see the situation first hand. “We are not just sitting under coconut trees and waiting for coconuts to fall,” he said, stressing the need for proactive measures.
To an inquiry about Palau’s bid to bring the climate change issue before the International Court of Justice as a security and human rights violation, he said it was an interesting effort, but was not moving anywhere.
ARRIA FORUMULA MEETING ON THE SECURITY DIMENSIONS OF CLIMATE CHANGE
STATEMENT BY STEPHANIE LEE
CHARGÉ D’AFFAIRES A.I.
15 FEBRUARY 2013
I thank Pakistan and the United Kingdom for refocusing the Security Council on this important issue.
In 2011 New Zealand supported the group of countries from the South Pacific and elsewhere who were calling on the Security Council to recognize the security implications of climate change. The fact that the Council adopted PPRST 2011/15 was a welcome step. But it was only a very modest beginning. A more intensive examination is now required.
While the global climate has always been variable, human-induced climate change is occurring at an unprecedented rate.It is not only small island states in the Pacific, the Indian Ocean and the Caribbean that are threatened, but climate change is also having an impact on security in regions such as Africa where decreased rainfall is increasing competition for scarce water and food. It is now beyond argument that international security depends on our collective ability to manage climate impacts in a shorter timescale. Globally, there is a tremendous body of scientific knowledge: we have a good idea of what is going to happen and what we might be able to do about it. And the Security Council needs to be a part of the process of raising awareness.
We agree with the Secretary General’s report that the best way to avoid climate change impacts is through comprehensive adaptation and global mitigation action. In the UNFCCC, New Zealand is therefore committed to developing a comprehensive legally binding climate change agreement, whose design ensures the participation of all major emitters and an ambitious outcome. A rules-based system with bounded flexibility – and differentiation on a continuum of commitments – will support both of these essential goals.
But climate change is an issue that must also be addressed across most of the international agenda. While it is not the Security Council’s role to be the author of a new rules-based system, it can and should add its weight to the case for an effective global response.
Moreover the Council must step up its efforts for preventive diplomacy and conflict avoidance. Internationally, and especially here in the United Nations, we already have mechanisms that address the kind of security challenges posed by climate change, whether competition for scarce resources including land and water, food security or disaster response. Existing mechanisms, including the Security Council, must recognise the threat multiplier that is climate change.
Security threats can be most effectively mitigated where climate change is “mainstreamed” in sustainable development planning to build confident, resilient communities, who have choices about whether to relocate or remain. At a national level, building adaptive capacity allows countries to better cope with climate-related events before they spiral into major security challenges. Work under way in the UNFCCC to consider arrangements on loss and damage from the adverse effects of climate change in developing countries will be an important part of that.
Co-chairs,
In 2011 New Zealand had the privilege of chairing the Pacific Islands Forum – a regional body that represents some of the smallest and most vulnerable states on this planet.
We share the fundamental concern of Pacific Island countries, and other particularly vulnerable countries, about the impacts of climate change – including stresses on food, fresh water, and energy supplies, as well as an increase in extreme weather events. And we share the concern that the impacts threaten the viability of some communities and raise questions about relocation. Pacific Islands Forum Leaders have recognized the desire to continue to live in their own countries, which is vital to retaining the Pacific’s social and cultural identity. It is time to think hard, and quickly, about how solutions to climate change can reflect the desire of people to continue to live in their own countries.
It was for these reasons New Zealand stood alongside our Pacific neighbours in co-sponsoring the UN General Assembly Resolution on Climate Change and its possible security implications in 2009 and New Zealand now in 2013 calls on the Security Council to take up this issue again this year.
Co-Chairs,
Both climate change and the responses to it will have far-reaching impacts over the decades ahead. We ask the Council to listen to the voices of those countries that face the most difficult transitions, and do all within its purview to ensure that the path to a climate-resilient future is stable and secure.
Islands want UN to see climate as security threat.
Posted: Feb 17, 2013 4:46 PM EST
Updated: Feb 17, 2013 4:46 PM EST
An April 25, 2007 file photo, a woman gathers shellfish on an eroded beach on Majuro Atoll in the Marshall Islands.
UNITED NATIONS (AP) — The Marshall Islands and other low-lying island nations {February 15, 2013, at the Arria formula UN Security Council non-Meeting} appealed to the U.N. Security Council to recognize climate change as an international security threat that jeopardizes their very survival.
Tony deBrum, a minister and assistant to the Marshall Islands president, said Friday the island nations are facing opposition from Security Council permanent members Russia and China and a group of more than 130 mainly developing nations, which argue that the U.N.’s most powerful body is the wrong place to address climate change.
DeBrum told reporters after a closed Security Council meeting on the “Security Dimensions of Climate Change,” organized by Britain and Pakistan, that he hopes more council members will be convinced that “this is a security issue and not just an economic-political-social issue.”
The low-lying islands, which are already being inundated with sea water, want the council to bring its “political weight” to the issue and help their countries survive, for example, by harnessing new technologies and ensuring alternative energy supplies, he said.
DeBrum said it was “ironic, bizarre perhaps” that 35 years after he went before the Security Council to seek the independence of the Marshall Islands he was back again “to appeal for the survival of my country.”
He said climate change has already taken a toll on the Marshall Islands. Wells have filled with salt water, making drinking water scarce and in turn affecting food production. One small island in a lagoon is now under water, and coastlines are being eroded.
The impact of climate change is also causing migration to other islands, as well as to Australia and the United States, he said.
In an interview Friday with The Associated Press, Rachel Kyte, the World Bank’s vice-president for sustainable development, said that since the council’s last discussion of climate change “the sense of immediacy and urgency has increased.”
“The question is: Do you want to keep on cataloguing all of the terrible things that are going to happen if we continue on a business as usual track, or are we actually going to start doing anything about it?” she said.
Kyte said she explained to the council on Friday that “it is possible to stop the worst from happening but it will require real, concerted policy action globally at every country level.”
“Economically we know what to do, but politically it’s going to take leadership,” she said. “And every day we don’t act we make the job more difficult for ourselves.”
“What the Security Council has to do is understand that everything has to be seen through this lens. Climate change is changing the future scenarios for every country,” Kyte said. “It’s framing decisions on security, economic security, food security.”
Germany’s Deputy U.N. Ambassador Miguel Berger recalled that in July 2011, at his country’s initiative, the Security Council discussed the security implications of climate change at a formal meeting and adopted a presidential statement expressing the council’s concern about the possible adverse effects of climate change on international peace and security.
Berger told the council that Germany was happy to see the council taking up the issue again and stressed that all U.N. entities, including the Security Council, need to intensify their efforts to combat climate change and its security implications. He called for these implications to be included in Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s reports to the council on climate change.
“Let us not forget: Climate change and its security implications will shape tomorrow’s world in a way that is almost impossible to overestimate,” Wittig said. “We should also consider whether a U.N. special envoy on climate and security could help us to tackle the foreign and security policy implications of climate change.”
Pakistan’s U.N. Ambassador Masood Khan said the meeting would galvanize actions in all U.N. forums to combat climate change.
“Our response should not be anchored only in politics; it should also be guided by science and technology,” Khan said. “Our response should not just counter immediate threats; it should forewarn and prepare us for the impending threats that impinge on our security.”
Ambassador Peter Thompson from Fiji speaks for the G 77 and China at the Arria Formula Non-meeting at the UNSC and the same day speaks also on the MDGs at a different meeting at the UN. We have here both his presentations.
To put it in diplomatic terms, we are amazed how the representative of a Small Islands State participates in the thrashing of its own future by serving the forces of business-as-usual that came about because of the influence the Islamic Oil States have on what at the UN goes under the term G 77 & China.
The Arria formula meeting of the Security Council – by its own definition a Non-meeting – came about as Member States with eyes open – have realized that the UN was incapable of moving on the issue of Climate Change, and this while practically every UN State has already stories to tell about losses from Climate Change – within their own territory or in States they do business with. The most hurt are obvious the Small Island States that might be completely wiped out by the effects of man-made Climate Change committed by other States. As such, transferring the issue to the Security Council, from the moribund UNFCCC and UNCSD, is an attempt to move the issue from the General Assembly UN debating club to the only UN institution that has the power to act. The alternative would be to close this UN, like the League of Nations was closed, and negotiate anew an organization with 193 Nations participating in a decision-for-action new mechanism. Every decent person would say this alternative will be unachievable. So what does Ambassador Peter Thompson, a traitor to the SIDS, mean by his statement on behalf of the negativistic uncounted governments from among the 77+China?
Further, the UNCSD will expire at the 2013 General Assembly meeting this coming September – as per a decision of the Rio+20 meeting June 2012. They will be replaced by a mechanism yet unknown, and dependent on recommendations that will be forthcoming from a special panel that was established in September 2012. The Issues of the MDGs and the newly to be formulated Sustainable Development Goals is also pending in the air – and that is part of the decisions of new UN formulas for 2015 and beyond. The distinguished Ambassador does seem to ignore all of this and try instead to stick with the formula of things that were totally rejected in Rio. Our conclusion is thus in non-diplomatic terms – he is sticking with the old ways that are responsible for the inaction at the UN that resulted in 20 wasted years, and at the same time puts sticks into the possible wheels of the UNSC with which some try to find ways to move out from the UN swamp.
In our postings about the Arria-formula meeting of Friday, February 15th we were able to bring forward the ridiculous Statement made by Egypt that clearly shows, that though it started out differently it got bent in haste to the same conclusions as the G77+China with even not having had the time to reconsider its own numbering system from the previous Arab League bent. The ray of light comes from Pakistan that seemingly decided to cosponsor the call to the Arria formula event, and obviously the SIDS that part now ways with the G77&China that did nothing for them in these lost 20 years.
I acknowledge the presence of Distinguished Panelist and Guest Speakers in today’s event. I thank the Secretary General for his Statement and note the interventions that have been made thus far.
I wish to express a special welcome to the Honorable Tony de Brum, Minister in Assistance to the President of the Republic of the Marshall Islands, I welcome the Director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research Professor Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, and the Vice-President and Network Head for Sustainable Development at the World Bank Ms. Rachel Kyte. I also wish to welcome the contributions through video recordings by the President of Kiribati His Excellency Mr. Anote Tong and the Foreign Minister of Australia Senator Bob Carr.
Mr. President,
I have the honour to deliver this statement on behalf of the Group of 77 and China.
We note the initiative of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan and of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland in organizing this Meeting which we note is being convened under the informal Arria Formula of the United Nations Security Council on the subject “Security Dimensions of Climate Change”
Mr. President,
The Group of 77 and China reiterates its position that the United Nations Security Council is not the appropriate forum for this discussion. The Group will repeat that the primary responsibility of the United Nations Security Council is the maintenance of international peace and security, as set out in the Charter of the United Nations.
On the other hand, other issues, including those related to economic and social development, are assigned by that same Charter to the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) and to the United Nations General Assembly (General Assembly).
The ever-increasing encroachment by the Security Council on the roles and responsibilities of other principal organs of the United Nations represents a distortion of the principles and purposes of the Charter, infringes on their authority and compromises the rights of the general membership of the United Nations.
Mr. President,
The Group of 77 and China underlines the importance of the General Assembly, the Security Council and the ECOSOC to work within their respective mandates as set out in the Charter.
General Assembly resolution 63/281 recognized the respective responsibilities of the principal organs of the United Nations, including the primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security conferred upon the Security Council and the responsibility for sustainable development issues, including climate change, conferred upon the General Assembly and the Economic and Social Council, and invited the relevant organs of the United Nations, as appropriate and within their respective mandates, to intensify their efforts in considering and addressing climate change, including its possible security implications.
The relevant bodies in the field of sustainable development are the General Assembly, the ECOSOC and their relevant subsidiary bodies, including the Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).
The Group of 77 and China is of the view that it is vital for all Member States to promote sustainable development in accordance with the Rio Principles, in particular, the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities, and fully implement Agenda 21 and Outcomes of other relevant United Nations Conferences in the economic, environmental and social fields, including the Millennium Development Goals Declaration.
We further emphasize the critical role of the international community in the provision of adequate, predictable, new and additional financial resources, transfer of technology and capacity building to developing countries.
We maintain that the UNFCCC is the primary international, intergovernmental forum for negotiating the global response to climate change. In this sense, we recall that an appropriate response to this challenge should address not only the consequences but mainly the roots of the problem. At the DOHA COP 18, we made progress towards addressing Climate Change through concrete decisions on remaining work under the Bali Action Plan, a Plan of work under the Durban Platform and a Second Commitment Period of the Kyoto Protocol with a clear time line. The Second Commitment Period of Kyoto Protocol, however, lacks ambition and we hope that its level will be enhanced in 2014 as agreed in Doha
Mr. President,
Let me emphasize that there is a strong case for developed countries’ emission reductions and mitigation actions to avoid adverse impacts of climate change. In this context, we are extremely concerned that current mitigation pledges from developed countries parties in the UNFCCC negotiations are not at all adequate to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions so as to hold the increase in global average temperature according to what is required by science.
We reiterate the need to coordinate international efforts and mobilize partners to assist the observation networks through regional initiatives such as South Pacific Sea Level and Climate Monitoring, and Caribbean Community Climate Change Center. In this regard, we call upon the relevant agencies and organs of the UN, including OCHA, to reinforce regional broadcastings systems to help island communities during disasters and increase the effectiveness of observation in these regions. Any measures taken in this context need to ensure an integrated approach in responding to environmental emergencies
The response to impacts of climate change and disasters must include the strengthening of the Hyogo Framework for Action for disaster risk reduction, the increasing of assistance to developing countries affected states, including by supporting efforts towards enhancing their national and regional capacities for implementation of plans and strategies for preparedness, rapid response, recovery and development.
Mr. President,
The Group would like to underline the fact that developing countries continue to suffer from the adverse impacts of climate change and the increasing frequency and intensity of extreme weather events. Developing countries are the most vulnerable to climate change, and support for their efforts needs to be stepped up.
In this regard, we call for the full and effective implementation of the commitments under the Barbados Programme of Action for the Sustainable Development of Small Island Developing States, the Mauritius Declaration and the Mauritius Strategy for the Further Implementation of the Programme of Action for the Sustainable Development of Small Island Developing States. We reiterate that sea-level rise and other adverse impacts of climate change continue to pose a significant risk to small island developing states and their efforts to achieve sustainable development and, for many, represent the gravest of threats to their survival and viability including for some through the loss of territory.
The Group of 77 and China will continue to pursue the achievement of sustainable development and eradication of poverty, which are our first and overriding priorities, as well as the fulfillment of commitments by developed countries in all relevant bodies.
Mr. President,
We strongly reiterate our expectation that the initiative of the Council to hold this debate does not create a precedent that undermines the authority or mandate of the relevant bodies, processes and instruments that already address these issues in all their complexities.
I have the honour to deliver this statement on behalf of the Group of 77 and China.
At the outset, may I express the Group’s congratulations on your appointment as Co-Facilitators on this very important item. I would also like to convey our appreciation for the dispatch of your Informal Food for Thought Paper which you intend to guide our reflections on the modalities and substance of the Special Event and, in particular, underlines the urgency of moving to an early decision on the modalities of the Event.
Co-Facilitators,
The Group of 77 notes that the Special Event is not a formal event of the General Assembly but an ad hoc meeting convened on a specific theme, that is, “To follow up on efforts made towards achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).” This process follows on from the request we made as Members States of the United Nations back in 2010 and it is a review of the efforts undertaken to date towards the achievement of the MDGs.
The Group is of the view that the Outcome of this Special Event must feed into an intergovernmental process for the elaboration of the post-2015 development agenda. Notwithstanding the link between the review of the MDGs and the elaboration of the post-2015 development agenda, the review that this Special Event will undertake must not be subservient to or dependent on other processes under way for the post-2015 agenda.
It is of fundamental importance that the Special Event produces concise and actionable outcomes which will sharpen the focus on achieving the MDGs. This must include means to prioritize funding for MDGs, particularly in line with international agreements on development financing.
Co-Facilitators,
Given the importance, complexity and time-sensitivity of the issues that the Special Event must address, the Group welcomes the holding of this event during the High-level segment of the 68th UN General Assembly. However, the Group is concerned that a one-day meeting may not achieve the kind of concrete results that is needed for this final push on MDGs within the MDG period. The Group would therefore like further consideration of the time allotted for this Special Event.
Co-Facilitators,
These are our initial thoughts. We will revert with more substantial input during the course of our consultations under your able facilitation. The Group assures you of its continued support and constructive engagement in the preparations and conduct of this Special Event.
Australia’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Senator Bob Carr, spoke from the Island Republic of Kiribati, the Bikenikora Village, where he went to visit with President Anote Tong of the Republic of Kiribati. and prepared there a tape to be used for the Arria formula non-meeting at the UN Security Council, February 15, 2013. We made some excerpts because it presents interesting angles of what sea-rise could mean to an Island State. This is a potential clear wipe-out. A UN Member State might simply be discontinued because we emit greenhouse gasses.Just think of it.
What happens with the water area where there used to be an inhabited land? Who takes over the non-existent sunken State? What happens to the mineral and oil rights at the bottom of the former territorial waters?
How do you organize the migration of the inhabitants to another country? Do you establish training centers in the country of origin so that the incoming folks fit better into the adopting society? This is what Australia and New Zealand have to consider in their relations to Kiribati.
Australia’s Foreign Minister Bob Carr has recorded a video message that he says is intended as a call to action at the United Nations. He says that climate change is now a matter of security.
The Foreign Minister says his video message is about approaching the problem of getting world consensus on climate change from a slightly different tack.
Senator Carr recorded his message in the low-lying Pacific nation of Kiribati, and warned that rising sea levels will make the place uninhabitable within 10 to 20 years and force the mass migration of its population.
Bob Carr’s recorded message will be a contribution to a climate debate in the United Nations early next month. He says Kiribati is in the frontline of climate change and president Tong is keen for the world to understand his country’s special message.
The message is to be played at next month’s UN Security Council debate on climate change, as Alexandra Kirk reported for ABC News.
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BOB CARR: My name’s Bob Carr, I’m the Foreign Minister of Australia. I’m here in Kiribati with the president of this small, island country, president Tong. And what I’m looking at here is the living reality of climate change. This is a village; the tide rises and floods it. This did not happen in the past, and it sends a message of what might happen to this nation of 100,000 people over six islands should the temperature continue to warm and the sea levels continue to rise.
Australia’s working with Kiribati on mitigation measures, like planting mangroves to hold back the tides – even so, Kiribati still faces a future determined by climate change.
Well the president spoke about two decades being all they’ve got left if ocean levels continue to rise. We’re sending to the UN Security Council this key notion that climate change is a security issue.
You take Kiribati as an early warning sign. If they have to evacuate because rising levels of salt water have inundated their fresh water and there’s no drinking water on the islands, then they will be an example of environmental migration. They would be environmental refugees.
The UN is concerned with problems of peace and security. That defines its charter, especially that of the Security Council. We’re saying that if, for example, a population is driven from its traditional home by rising sea level, then this creates a problem of peace and security.
And if it can happen with Kiribati, it can happen with other vulnerable low-lying areas in poor developing countries.
If Kiribati ends up being a victim of climate change, presumably the burden will fall on Australia and possibly New Zealand. Is that correct?
I think we have to accept that as a given, hence our very big commitment to English language and technical education.
I was at a training college in Kiribati and I saw Australian teachers provided by AusAid, some of them volunteers, working hard to lift English education and provide training in carpentry and motor mechanics so that if it does arise that the population has to be relocated, they can enter the workforce of countries like New Zealand and Australia, with Australian qualifications.
That’s the key, they’re being educated to Australian qualifications, they’re winning Australian trade certificates.
That means, that presents, not as desperate environmental refugees, but as proud skilled migrants, and that’s a serious strategic commitment on our part.
Tomorrow morning (15 February) Ambassador Mark Lyall Grant (UK) and Ambassador Masood Khan (Pakistan) will co-chair an Arria formula meeting on the “Security Dimensions of Climate Change”. It seems that the aim of the debate is to have an interactive and frank session on how climate change can negatively impact the maintenance of international peace and security and to highlight the security implications of intensified climate change.The co-chairs are hoping that the discussion will also touch on possible steps that could be taken to move from a culture of reaction to a culture of prevention.
Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon is expected to make remarks at the start of the meeting.
This will be followed by presentations from a panel of speakers that includes the Honorable Mr. Tony deBrum, Minister in Assistance to the President of the Marshall Islands;
Professor Hans Schellnhuber, Head of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impacts Research;
Ms. Rachel Kyte, World Bank Vice-President for Sustainable Development;
and Mr. Gyan Acharya, Under-Secretary-General and High Representative for least developed countries, landlocked developing countries, and small island developing states.
Following these presentations, Security Council members, other member states and civil society participants are also expected to make their interventions.
A concept paper was circulated earlier this month to help guide the discussion. It outlines some of the security challenges and highlights key issues that could be taken up during the meeting. For example, it notes that climate change can worsen threats created by poverty and poor management of resources. It also points out that climate change could eventually make citizens residing in low lying small island states “stateless”, thus raising a number of legal issues. Finally, the paper asks if there are ways to enhance cooperation to manage shared water resources more effectively given growing water scarcity, and whether current mechanisms to curtail competition over natural resources can be strengthened.
The Council has held two previous debates on the security implications of climate change. The first was held in April 2007 (S/PV.5663), under the UK presidency, and considered the relationship between energy, security and climate. At the time a number of Council members had reservations about holding the debate on the grounds that it was unclear whether or not climate change could usefully be addressed within the Council’s mandate and there was no attempt to have a formal outcome.
The second debate (S/PV.6587), held in July 2011 under the German presidency, was on the impact of climate change on peace and security. Although negotiations were difficult Council members were able to agree on a presidential statement (S//PRST/2011/15) which highlighted that rising sea-levels may carry security implications for low-lying island states. The presidential statement also requested the Secretary-General to ensure that his reports to the Council on peace and security matters contain contextual information on possible security implications of climate change.
Including climate change on its agenda has been quite a contentious issue for the Council.
There are still some members who are less comfortable with the Council making decisions on an issue that they are not convinced is an explicit threat to peace and security.
An Arria formula meeting perhaps provides an opportunity to pursue this issue in an informal format that allows Council members to hear the views of a diverse and informed group with a stake in the issue. Among the permanent members, France, the UK, and the US have argued that the Council is an appropriate forum to discuss threats to international peace and security related to climate change. In effect, they see the Council’s efforts to address climate change as a part of its conflict prevention efforts.
However, China and Russia have a different position, having argued that the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change is the appropriate venue within the UN system for deliberations on this issue.
Of the new Council members, Australia and Luxembourg in particular have shown concern about the security threats posed by climate change and believe that it is an issue that the Council should address.
BLOOMBERG NEWS is first Large Media Network to report on the Arias method meeting at the UN Security Council, with closed doors to the Press but open door to UN Member States in general, today, Friday, February 15, 2013, which we had on our website for a while, and the previous link we got was from Matthew Lee of the Correspondents for Free Access to UN news.
Also, the UN Secretary General, Mr. Ban Ki-moon, after his speech at the Council on Foreign Relations this past Monday, and his two days in Washington DC – Wednesday and Thursday, will participate at the UNSC meeting today. We hope that through his presentation the subject will become available to the public at large – that is, if the UN Department of Public Information will deem it important enough to sponsor it to the Press in general. So far we got this through UN Wire of the UN Foundation.
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Climate Change’s Links to Conflict Draws UN Attention.
By Flavia Krause-Jackson – Feb 14, 2013 10:30 PM ET
Imagine India in 2033. It has overtaken China as the most populous nation. Yet with 1.5 billion citizens to feed, it’s been three years since the last monsoon. Without rain, crops die and people starve. The seeds of conflict take root.
Climate Change as Source of Future Conflict Draws UN Attention.
In the wake of Hurricane Sandy, climate change is a topic that has moved higher on the list of U.S. domestic issues. Photographer: Emile Wamsteker/Bloomberg
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This is one of the scenarios Joachim Schellnhuber, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, will present today to members of the United Nations Security Council in New York to show the connection between climate change and global security challenges.
Either rich nations will find a way to supply needy nations suffering from damaging climate effects “or you will have all kinds of unrest and revolutions, with the export of angry and hungry people to the industrialized countries,” Schellnhuber said in an interview.
Climate change is a “reality that cannot be washed away,” according to notes prepared for diplomats at today’s session. “There is growing concern that with faster than anticipated acceleration, climate change may spawn consequences which are harsher than expected.”
The Security Council session is evidence of the increased focus on the link between climate change and global security.
Yet, today’s discussions will not be held as a formal meeting of the council because China and Russia, two of the larger emitters of the greenhouse gases that scientists tie to climate change, raised objections, said two UN diplomats who asked not to be named given the sensitivity of the subject. China was the largest gross emitter of carbon dioxide in 2011, followed by the U.S., the European Union, India and Russia, according to the European Commission’s Joint Research Center.
Informal Talks AT THE UN SECURITY COUNCIL – the ARIAS information gathering method:
Instead, the informal, closed-door discussions will be held away from the council chamber and led jointly by the U.K. and Pakistan, where floods have left millions of people homeless in a foreshadowing of the extreme weather scientists say will result from a warming planet.
“Before it was always an issue of the developed world, so the involvement of Pakistan is a very interesting sign,” said Schellnhuber, a climate change scientist who is German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s top adviser on the issue.
Representatives from nations not on the 15-member Security Council are invited to the session, and UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon plans to participate. In 2011, the council agreed to a statement expressing “concern that the possible adverse effects of climate change may, in the long run, aggravate certain existing threats to international peace and security.”
“It was OK, but it was rather vague,” said Schellnhuber.
Hottest Year
With 2012 the world’s hottest year on record, the implications for both domestic and foreign policy of wildfires in Australia and Russia, floods in Asia and hurricanes in the Americas give today’s discussion an added sense of urgency.
In the wake of Hurricane Sandy, it’s a topic that has moved higher on the list of U.S. domestic issues. President Barack Obama presented climate change as a priority for his second term during his Feb. 12 State of the Union address.
“Heat waves, droughts, wildfires, and floods — all are now more frequent and intense,” Obama said in his speech. “We can choose to believe that Superstorm Sandy, and the most severe drought in decades, and the worst wildfires some states have ever seen were all just a freak coincidence. Or we can choose to believe in the overwhelming judgment of science — and act before it’s too late.”
U.S. intelligence agencies said in a December report that climate change coupled with water shortages will alter global patterns of arable land, while greater demand for energy may curb the amount of raw materials available to make fertilizers.
Critical Resources
Climate change will complicate resource management, particularly in Asia where monsoons are crucial to the growing season, according to the 140-page Global Trends 2030 report, produced by the U.S. intelligence community. It will worsen the outlook for availability of critical resources of food, water and energy, the report said.
Rising global temperatures may provoke conflict between the European Union and Russia as Arctic ice melts, easing access to fossil-fuel deposits in that area and opening new sea routes, Schellnhuber said.
The conflict in the Sudan’s western region of Darfur has generated headlines over the years as the first climate war because drought and the advancing desert stoked tensions.
“Many developing and fragile states — such as in Sub- Saharan Africa — face increasing strains from resource constraints and climate change, pitting different tribal and ethnic groups against one another,” according to the Global Trends report.
Environmental Refugees
The millions of environmental refugees, such as those displaced by natural disasters and rising sea levels due to melting ice, will be one focus of the UN session, as will be the potential for conflicts.
The UN’s decision-making body will discuss the challenges from reduced water availability, a critical issue in the Middle East and Africa, and also explore the implications of glacial melting.
Melting ice caps has led to a push to strengthen the Law of the Sea, an accord granting countries bordering the Arctic rights to economic zones within 200 miles (322 kilometers) of their shores. Russia, for example, has staked a claim to a North Pole seabed worth billions of dollars in oil and natural gas.
“The impacts of climate change, such as sea-level rises, drought, flooding and extreme weather events, can exacerbate underlying tensions and conflict in part of the world already suffering from resource pressures,” according to the U.K.- Pakistan notes.
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– With assistance from Alex Morales in London. Editors: Terry Atlas, Michael Shepard
To contact the reporter on this story: Flavia Krause-Jackson in United Nations at fjackson@bloomberg.net
After almost four decades under US administration as the easternmost part of the UN Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands, the Marshall Islands attained independence in 1986 under a Compact of Free Association. Compensation claims continue as a result of US nuclear testing on some of the atolls between 1947 and 1962. The Marshall Islands hosts the US Army Kwajalein Atoll (USAKA)
Reagan Missile Test Site, a key installation in the US missile defense network.
constitutional government in free association with the US; the Compact of Free Association entered into force on 21 October 1986 and the Amended Compact entered into force in May 2004
blue with two stripes radiating from the lower hoist-side corner – orange (top) and white; a white star with four large rays and 20 small rays appears on the hoist side above the two stripes; blue represents the Pacific Ocean, the orange stripe signifies the Ralik Chain or sunset and courage, while the white stripe signifies the Ratak Chain or sunrise and peace; the star symbolizes the cross of Christianity, each of the 24 rays designates one of the electoral districts in the country and the four larger rays highlight the principal cultural centers of Majuro, Jaluit, Wotje, and Ebeye; the rising diagonal band can also be interpreted as representing the equator, with the star showing the archipelago’s position just to the north
Columbia Law School Climate Law Blog has posted a new item,’Upcoming Event -
The United Nations Climate Negotiations: Perspectives From a Small Island
Nation’ – our update is after the event and before moving the outcome to the UN Security Council – Friday February 15, 2013.
On Wednesday, February 13, 2013, 7:00 pm to 9:00 pm, the Center for Climate
Change Law will host a discussion with Tony deBrum, Minister in Assistance to
the President of the Marshall Islands and former Foreign Minister, and Dr.
Radley Horton, Center for Climate Systems Research, Columbia University, focused
on the UN Climate Negotiations from [...]
Info: The United Nations Climate Negotiations: Perspectives From a Small Island Nation
Date/Time: February 13, 2013 from 7:00 pm to 9:00 pm EST
Location: Columbia Law School, Jerome Greene Hall room 101, 435 West 116th Street (at Amsterdam Avenue)
The February 13, 2013 event at the Columbia University School of Law – was in effect a dry-run of what will be presented to the UN Security Council on Friday Februaruy 15, 2013 in an Arias format meeting – that is in an information gathering session – a closed meeting of the UNSC that will dash out the issue of climate change endangering the security of the people of the Marshall Islands in particular and of all small island States of the Pacific. Further the problem of climate change caused flooding of coastal areas, tsunamis, and the probable wiping out of whole populations will be on the UN table.
An Araias is not a negotiation that expects an outcome – it is plain information gathering that can later lead to discussions that come before attempts at decision making.
The Ambassador Representing the Republic of the Marshall Islands at the United Nations, H.E. Ms. Amatlain Elizabeth Kabua, was present at the Columbia University’s Center for Climate Change Law event.
Professor Michael B. Gerrard, head of the Center, has already produced several volumes of study of the problems posed by a budding Climate Change impacts legal system dealing with “Threatened Island Nations” and “The Law of Adaptation to Climate Change – US and International Aspects” – both being titles of appropriate volumes.
At the meeting on Wednesday, Prof. Gerrard introduced the general problem of Climate Change, Judge Jack B. Weinstein, US District Court, Eastern District of New York, introduced legal aspects, Professor Radley Horton of the Center for Climate Systems Research at Columbia University, spoke of the scientific aspects, with Tony deBrum of the Marshall Islands President’s office and former Foreign Minister describing the legal situation aspects of the Marshall islands and the impact the US had on those islands, and students and others fielding many questions.
Professor Horton showed a graph of sea level rise 1870-2006 by Church & White from UNEP (2006), and material from the US National Climate Assessment (2013) dealing with “Hawaii and Affiliated Lands.”
My eye caught here indication about VERTICAL LAND MOTIONS which a couple of years ago we attributed to the melting of the ice-cover of Antarctica and a release of pressure on the Antarctic plate that reaches to the “Ring of Fire” of volcanoes and earth-quakes on its border with other tectonic plates. We suggested the movement causes earth-quakes that cause the tsunamis that flood coastlines and islands – thus this whole set of events being Climate Change related. The issue explains thus enhanced flooding that impacts countries like Bangladesh. At the end of the meeting I had a chance to talk about this with Mr. deBrum of the Marshall Islands who will be the main presenter at the Arias meeting at the UN Security Council. We will revisit this later.
The case of the Marshall Islands is particularly bad and the responsibility of the United States is particularly great – this going back to the many nuclear experiments that for a couple of years were detonating powerful bombs in the Bikini and other island locations. The destruction of those islands started already at that time – now it is continued with the attacks of climate change greenhouse gas emissions.
As the Marshall Islands is a State with few inhabitants, the answer to move them somewhere else is not acceptable to the islanders. They prefer compensation and the condtruction of physical barriers. They also have suggestions for Renewable energy production using commercial OTEC technology (Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion). The first 20 MW floating OTEC electric generation plant will be completed by 2017.
In my discussion with Mr. deBrum I suggested getting States like Bangladesh and other States of large population involved, as the Security Council has to hear about large number of people being affected in order to move them to action – and the mentioned Tsunami-effect ought to be pushed forward. I mentioned to him the Washington military-people event when a Brigadier-General from Bangladesh asked – “when 10 million people moving to higher ground because of the floods, get to the Indian border, which way am I supposed to shoot,” that was a moment of truth that an Arias meeting at the UNSC can start worrying about.
January 12, 2013 will mark the third anniversary of the catastrophic earthquake from which Haiti continues to try to rebuild.
The PPAF’s pilot study engaged in our Cookstove and Fuel Alternatives Initiative in Haiti.
Our work aims to bring jobs, better health and less deforestation
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Topic: “Changing Lives in Haiti”
The Public-Private Alliance Foundation, with support from the Community Church and others, is leading pilot projects in Haiti that are laying the basis for major changes in how people cook. Efforts are underway to meet a demand in households and small businesses to exit the poverty-disease-deforestation trap of cooking with charcoal.
January - Haiti -David Stillman and colleagues will travel to Haiti to develop ethanol production and stove distribution and follow progress of the piloting of the ethanol cookstoves and briquette press.
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Published, The New York Times: December 24, 2012 160 Comments
LOS BANOS, Calif. — The Morning Star Company’s three plants in California emit roughly 200,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year — about the same amount as the Pacific Island nation of Palau — as they turn tomatoes into ketchup, spaghetti sauce and juice used by millions of consumers around the world.
Ramin Rahimian for The New York Times A Morning Star tomato processing plant in Los Banos, Calif. Morning Star and 350 other companies statewide will begin paying for carbon emissions on Jan. 1.
Beginning Jan. 1, under the terms of a groundbreaking California environmental law known as AB 32, Morning Star and 350 other companies statewide will begin paying for those emissions, which trap heat and contribute to global warming.
Companies are trying to figure out how this will affect their bottom lines and have lobbied state regulators to minimize the costs. In the meantime they are weighing their options. Should they stay and adapt or move operations elsewhere? Should they retrofit and innovate to reduce emissions? Should they swallow the regulatory costs or pass them on to customers?
Each company’s calculus depends on its particular circumstance. Morning Star, a top producer in a $926 million industry, has to be near the tomato fields of California’s Central Valley, so relocating was never an option. Its biggest question is how to handle the extra costs.
About 600 facilities with hefty emissions are covered by the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006. Oil refiners, electric utilities and cement makers, whose greenhouse-gas output totals in the millions of metric tons annually, are the biggest. But over all, dozens of industries are affected.
In recent months, as the start date of the new cap-and-trade program neared, California regulators have fine-tuned the rules, industry by industry, to avoid imposing severe economic hardship while trying to keep the rules stringent. It is a delicate balance. Regulators do not want California companies to lose their competitive edge, because that could make other state governments reluctant to adopt this approach.
Cement plants near Los Angeles compete with plants across the Arizona border. State tomato processors control more than 95 percent of the American market, but they fear that the fast-growing Chinese sector could make inroads.
Officials in affected industries acknowledge they are struggling with how to proceed. As Meredith Fowlie, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, explained, “Their calculations have to be that we either sit here and emit and pay the cost of doing so, or alternatively we can look at options” like paying for major capital improvements to reduce emissions.
The state’s Air Resources Board is using an array of policies to reach its intended goal of reducing emissions to 1990 levels by 2020. It has tried to structure the cap-and-trade program to encourage industry investment in energy efficiency that could cut costs as well as lower emissions. Investing in energy efficiency may make sense for companies under California’s rules, Dr. Fowlie said, “but if they are making them before their competitors, that could be fatal.”
The rules are relatively simple for producers like Morning Star. At the end of 2014, they must present state-issued allowances — one per metric ton of emissions — for the greenhouse gases they emitted in 2013.
For the 200,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide emitted annually by Morning Star’s three plants, the company is being awarded about 192,500 free allowances the first year; the company must buy the remainder on the open market. In the first allowance auction in November, the allowance price settled at $10.09 a ton, meaning in the first year Morning Star has to pay roughly $75,000 to cover its emissions.
But over the next five years, the number of free allowances will decrease sharply to encourage further emissions cuts. At current rates, that means Morning Star will have to buy 100,000 allowances for both 2017 and 2018, by which time the prices may have doubled or tripled in an open market. The company estimates the law will cost it an extra $20 million over the next seven years.
Nick Kastle, a company spokesman, said it would almost certainly pass on the new costs to makers of ketchup and frozen pizza, which would be likely to share the extra costs with consumers. “People nationwide are going to be affected by AB 32,” he said.
But many economists said they think such a cost-centric analysis ignores the jobs and economic activity that the law could generate. Emission and efficiency standards for cars, buildings and appliances in California over the last four decades have succeeded in cleaning the air, making residents’ per-capita energy use rate among the lowest in the country and spurring innovations and new industries, like the one that arose around catalytic converters.
“It’s almost a Darwinian point,” said Matthew Kahn, an economist at the University of California, Los Angeles. While some companies’ costs will no doubt rise, he said, the law creates moneymaking opportunities by forcing a rethinking of industrial processes.
For some industries, the options are limited. Cement cannot be made without releasing carbon dioxide as a byproduct, although engineers are trying to reduce the amount emitted. At least one new California company is experimenting with a process that captures and stores carbon that would otherwise be emitted.
Morning Star, praised for its management innovations, has also won respect for improving its energy efficiency through equipment retrofits over the years. “If you have any ideas for efficiency,” Mr. Kastle said, “we’ll look at them.”
“We deploy what we believe, based on the economics, are the most efficient tomato-processing facilities in the world,” he said in an interview at the company’s plant in Los Banos. “And there are only two major costs in producing tomato paste: tomatoes and energy.”
He was standing at the center of the plant’s steaming Emerald City-like pipes and towers, beneath a network of artificial watercourses along which 838 tons of bobbing, colorful fruit move through the factory each hour in harvest season.
To run the conveyor system and to heat and sterilize the product, the plant uses five boilers, the newest of which is four years old and the oldest, 30. Replacing a boiler costs millions of dollars.
Mr. Kastle said Morning Star’s margins are too slim to absorb new regulatory costs. But he also worries about the consequence of passing them on. He knows that the California garlic industry lost half its market to Chinese imports in less than a decade, and notes that China’s tomato-processing industry is on the rise.
The Air Resources Board is also wary of this competitive situation, which is why it has been flexible about adjusting its regulation.
Steven Cliff, the California regulator most familiar with food processing, said that companies need the free allocations in the early years. “In a global marketplace you can’t pass along all of your costs,” he said.
More allocations go to industries that are at risk of leaving the state and emitting their pollution elsewhere or of ceding market share to foreign companies that are likely to be big emitters. The term of art for the problem is “leakage.” The more leakage, the less effective the California law will be at reducing greenhouse gas emissions over all.
State regulators consider cement manufacturers highly vulnerable to leaving the state, and food processors moderately vulnerable; both have been granted additional allowances to ease the transition.
For many economists, the crucial issue for now is not emissions but the creation of a viable market that sets a price on carbon. “The bottom line of what we’re trying to achieve here is a stable, predictable price of carbon,” said Frank A. Wolak, a Stanford economist. “If it’s a stable price, people are more likely to say, ‘I’ll make the investment because at this price it is going to save me money.’ ”
For now, Morning Star plans to stay here and pass on the new costs. Whether that changes the dynamics of its market is anyone’s guess.
Oscar Niemeyer – the architect who signed off the UN Headquarter building that is now in the process of its first renovation – died in Rio de Janeiro December 5, 2012 at 10 days short of 105 years of age.
He gave Brasílian Architecture Its Flair – tall buildings and curves. Earlier this year, Niemeyer supervised the renovation of the iconic Sambadrome, the “temple of Samba” which he designed 30 years ago, and where the raucous parades of Rio’s Carnival are held each year. He also had worked on building Brasilia – the capital of Brazil while standing up for the communist party of Brazil.
The Brazilian Congress in Brasilia, designed by Oscar Niemeyer (AFP/File, Evaristo Sa)
Major news today – in all media – is the passing away of Master Builder Niemeyer of Brazil. It first came to my attention in a great article in the New York Times written by a past architectural critic of his.
Oscar Ribeiro de Almeida Niemeyer Soares Filho - known as Oscar Niemeyer – lived in his beloved Rio de Janeiro (December 15, 1907 – December 5, 2012) was one of six children of a typographer and his wife. His father owned a graphic arts business, and a grandfather was a judge on the country’s supreme court. A precocious talent, Mr. Niemeyer was trained at the National School of Fine Arts, where he soon drew the attention of its dean, Lucio Costa. Costa was at the center of a small group of architects working to bring the message of Modernist architecture to Brazil.
The timing was ideal. Costa was then designing the Ministry of Education and Health’s headquarters in Rio, and he invited Mr. Niemeyer to join his firm as a draftsman. In 1936, the ministry hired the Swiss-born architect Le Corbusier to contribute ideas for the design. Le Corbusier was already a legend in architecture, and the building would become the first major public project by a Modernist architect in Latin America.
Mr. Niemeyer, one of several draftsmen assigned to the project, absorbed Le Corbusier’s vision of a modern world shaped by the myth of the machine, and drew on the master’s belief in an architecture of abstract forms enlivened by a sensitive use of light and air.
But Mr. Niemeyer was also a self-confident apprentice with a vision of his own; under Costa’s supervision, he made significant changes to Le Corbusier’s scheme. The columns supporting the building’s main office block were more than doubled in height, giving the structure a more slender profile. An auditorium that Le Corbusier had envisioned as a separate structure was tucked under the office block, creating a more compact urban composition.
Shielded from the sun behind rows of elegant baffles, the building had a clean, stripped-down style that made it a sparkling example of classical Modernism while heralding Brazil’s emergence as a vibrant center of experimentation.
Mr. Niemeyer’s name soon became synonymous with the new Brazilian architecture. In 1939, he collaborated with Costa on the Brazilian Pavilion for the New York World’s Fair. Three years later, he completed his first house, a simple modern box resting on slender columns on a mountainside overlooking the magnificent Rodrigo de Freitas lagoon. In these and other early projects, Mr. Niemeyer was beginning to develop a distinctive architecture of flowing lines, structural lightness and an open relationship to natural surroundings.
At the same time, he was becoming politically outspoken. Reared in a quiet upper-middle-class Rio neighborhood by his maternal grandparents, Mr. Niemeyer joined the Communist Party.
When the Brazilian government released hundreds of political prisoners, including Communists, as a gesture of good will in the 1940s, Mr. Niemeyer turned over the first floor of his Rio office to the party for use as a headquarters. To him, architecture’s social impact had its limits. “Architecture will always express the technical and social progress of the country in which it is carried out,” he once said. “If we wish to give it the human content that it lacks, we must participate in the political struggle.”
Yet the project that established him as a major architectural force was essentially a playground for the nouveaux riches in a wealthy suburb on the outskirts of Belo Horizonte, an industrial city. Commissioned in 1940 by a local mayor, Juscelino Kubitschek, who later, as president of Brazil, would hire Mr. Niemeyer to design Brasília’s major buildings, the project included a casino, a yacht club, a dance hall and a church arrayed around an artificial lake.
The casino was particularly striking. A concrete-and-glass shell, it was conceived as part of an architectural promenade that fused the complex with the natural landscape. The dance hall was distinguished by its free-form canopy made of cast concrete, its contours meant to suggest the flowing movements of the samba.
That project never functioned as planned. The casino was transformed into an art museum soon after gambling was outlawed by the Brazilian government in 1946. And the Roman Catholic authorities were offended by the church’s unusual curved concrete form and refused to consecrate it until 1959.
The complex’s bold, sweeping lines and snaking walkways, gently echoing the surrounding hills, suggested a subliminal hedonism that was at odds with the public’s image of mainstream Modernism as determinedly functional and emotionally cool. The design also heralded Mr. Niemeyer’s war against the straight line, whose rigidity he saw as a kind of authoritarian constraint.
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THE UN BUILDING IN NEW YORK
Mr. Niemeyer’s international status was confirmed by the Brazil Builds exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1943, a show that also introduced his work to an American audience. Four years later, he joined Le Corbusier again, this time as an equal, when the two were selected to take part in designing the United Nations complex in Manhattan.
Supervised by Wallace K. Harrison, the United Nations design was a collaboration that also included international luminaries like the Soviet architect Nikolai D. Bassov and Max Abramovitz of New York. The final design was a compromise of sorts between Mr. Niemeyer’s concepts and those of his aging idol Le Corbusier and its final signature was by Oscar Niemeyer.
Set amid gardens and plazas, the slim, glass-clad Secretariat tower and the sculptural concrete General Assembly building remain testaments to the belief in rationalism as a means to resolve international disputes and disparities.
The – History of the Le Corbusier – Niemeyer cooperation: Right after his arrival in New York, Niemeyer met Corbusier on his demands. He requested Niemeyer not to submit a scheme, but rather to collaborate with him on a project, on the basis that he could ‘create a commotion’. It was Wallace Harrison who tried to convince Niemeyer to move on his own.
50 designs were evaluated by the team, and Niemeyer’s project 32 was finally chosen. As opposed to Corbusier’s project 23, which consisted of one building containing both the Assembly Hall and the councils in the centre of the site (as it was hierarchically the most important building), Niemeyer’s plan split the councils from the Assembly Hall, locating the first alongside the river, and the second on the right side of the secretariat. This would not split the site, but on the contrary, would create a large civic square. George Dudley latter stated:
It literally took our breath away to see the simple plane of the site kept open from First Avenue to the River, only three structures on it, standing free, a fourth lying low behind them along the river’s edge.…He [Niemeyer] also said, ‘beauty will come from the buildings being in the right space!’. The comparison between Le Corbusier’s heavy block and Niemeyer’s startling, elegantly articulated composition seem to me to be in everyone’s mind…
Latter on the day, Corbusier came once again to Niemeyer, and asked him to reposition the Assembly Hall back to the centre of the site. Such modification would destroy Niemeyer’s plans for a large civic square. However, he finally decided to accept the modification:
I felt he [Corbusier] would like to do his project, and he was the master. I do not regret my decision.
Together, they submitted the scheme 23–32, which was built and is what can be seen today.
Oscar Niemeyer in the 1950s
UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld in front of the General Assembly building (1950s)
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BRASILIA
In his designs for Brasília, the capital city built in the vast undeveloped lands of the Brazil’s central region, Mr. Niemeyer got the opportunity to create his own poetic vision of the future on a monumental scale.
The city’s cross-shaped master plan, with repetitive rows of housing set around a formal administrative center, was designed by Costa, Mr. Niemeyer’s old mentor. But it was Mr. Niemeyer who gave Brasília its sculptural identity.
The speed with which the city was created, between 1956 and 1960, reinforced its image as a utopian dream that had sprouted magically out of a primitive landscape. Its crisp, abstract forms seemed to sum up the aspirations of much of the developing world: the belief that modern architecture and the faith in technological progress that it embodied could help create a more egalitarian society.
Arranged along a vast, grassy esplanade, Mr. Niemeyer’s buildings acquire a certain grandeur in their isolation. The most spectacular is the Metropolitan Cathedral, a circular, crownlike structure that splays open at the top to let light spill into the main sanctuary.
Yet much of Brasília’s beauty lay in an architectural balancing act. The simple twin towers of its secretariat, for example, play off the geometric bowl-like forms of the Senate and Chamber of Deputies. The entire complex suggests a world in perfect harmony, even if the politicians and bureaucrats who work there are not. The languorous sensuality of Mr. Niemeyer’s designs are underscored in early sketches for Brasília. They often depict naked young women sunbathing on a vast empty plaza as his buildings recede in the background. It’s an image of romantic alienation that has more in common with the films of Michelangelo Antonioni than with the utopian aspirations of early Modernism.
“For me,” Mr. Niemeyer said years later, “beauty is valued more than anything — the beauty that is manifest in a curved line or in an act of creativity.”
Brasília was considered his greatest triumph, but he had little time to glory in it. In 1964, after a coup put the country in the hands of a military dictatorship, he was repeatedly questioned by the military police about his Communist associations. Although he was never imprisoned, commissions dried up.
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YEARS OF INTELLECTUAL EXILE
With the generals in charge of Brazil and the anti-communism rampant in the US, he could work by proxy or limit himself to communism in Western Europe. He was chosen to design a business center on Claughton Island near Miami. But the United States, still in the grip of the cold war, denied him a visa. (Around the same time, he also designed a house in Santa Monica, Calif., one he never saw.)
Unable to find work in Brazil, Mr. Niemeyer fled to Europe, where he received commissions to design the Communist Party headquarters in Paris, completed in 1980, and the House of Culture in Le Havre, France (1982), with its low conical dome and a spectacular concrete ramp corkscrewing into the earth.
Modernism was by then falling out of favor with the architectural establishment. Brasília soon became a symbol of Modernism’s failure to deliver on its utopian promises. The vast empty plazas seemed to sum up the social alienation of modern society; surrounded by slums, the monumental government buildings of its center exemplified Brazil’s deeply rooted social inequalities.
Mr. Niemeyer addressed the criticism in a profile by the critic Michael Kimmelman in The New York Times Magazine in 2005. “You may not like Brasília,” he told Mr. Kimmelman, “but you can’t say you have seen anything like it — you maybe saw something better, but not the same. I prefer Rio, even with the robberies. What can you do?” He added: “But people who live in Brasília, to my surprise, don’t want to leave it. Brasília works. There are problems. But it works. And from my perspective, the ultimate task of the architect is to dream. Otherwise nothing happens.”
In 1965 Niemeyer traveled to France for an exhibition in the Louvre museum.In 1966, at 59, he moved to Paris – he travelled to the city of Tripoli, Lebanon, to design the International Permanent Exhibition Centre. Despite completing construction, the start of the civil war in Lebanon prevented it from achieving its utility.
The Brazilian dictatorship lasted until 1985. Under João Figueiredo‘s rule it softened and gradually turned into a democracy. At this time Niemeyer decided to return to his country. During that decade he made the Memorial Juscelino Kubitschek (1980), the Pantheon (Panteão da Pátria e da Liberdade Tancredo Neves Pantheon of the Fatherland and Freedom, 1985) and the Latin America Memorial (1987) (dubbed by The Independent of London to be “…an incoherent and vulgar construction”). The memorial sculpture represents the wounded hand of Jesus, whose wound bleeds in the shape of Central and South America.
In 1988, at 81, Niemeyer was awarded the Pritzker Architecture Prize, the most prestigious award in architecture. From 1992 to 1996, Niemeyer was the president of the Brazilian Communist Party (PCB). As a lifelong activist, Niemeyer was chosen as a powerful public figure that could be linked to the party at a time when it appeared to be in its death throes after the demise of the USSR. Although not active as a political leader, his image helped the party to survive through its crisis, after the 1992 split and to remain as a political force in the national scene, which eventually led to its reconstruction. He was replaced by Zuleide Faria de Mello in 1996.
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OSCAR NIEMEYER AND ISRAEL – A NATURAL LOVE STORY.
In 1964 – thus before he settled in Paris – Niemeyer spent six months in Israel where he was brought by developer Yekutiel Federman and as per HAARETZ of today - www.haaretz.com/print-edition/bus… – he left behind at least two executed projects – the Kikar Hamedina – the large round-about in what was then North-Tel Aviv, and and the Haifa University, but the most interesting proposal was the planned city that was never built.
Niemeyer, who as a declared communist, was excited about the socialist settlements in Israel, and described the Negev city of his planning, undoubtedly with a certain amount of naivete, as “a new type of metropolitan kibbutz that grew, became broader and more up-to-date, without losing its human values – enthusiasm, solidarity and idealism.”
Niemeyer’s work in Israel is the subject of historical research conducted by the architect Zvi Elhayani for his master’s degree in architecture at the Technion. Among the central issues in the study, which Elhayani concluded last year, is an analysis of Niemeyer’s critical assessment of planning concepts in Israel. In Niemeyer’s proposal for the Negev city, Elhayani sees a clear expression of this critical outlook. According to the study, Niemeyer already identified the low and sparse construction in new cities, and multitude of small communities, as a mistake that Israel would pay for in the future with a loss of open spaces.
During his stay in Israel, which is described in detail in Elhayani’s study, Niemeyer toured the newly constructed cities in the Negev: Yeruham, Dimona, Kiryat Gat, Eilat and the new neighborhoods of Be’er Sheva. According to Elhayani, Niemeyer was impressed by the desert vistas and construction boom, but expressed his disappointment “from the spatial spread and wastefulness that characterized the new cities, and he began to formulate a completely different urban concept.”
The sketches for the new Negev city, as presented in Elhayani’s study, show that the city was planned as a compact and crowded community, where the residents could take a short walk of no more than 500 meters to get from their homes to their jobs, schools and places of entertainment. Covered and shaded walkways were planned along the roadways, with pedestrian traffic separated from vehicular traffic. Niemeyer declared that he was seeking “to create optimal conditions for people to communicate and appropriate environments for work, culture and recreation, with the help of technological advances.”
From the outset, Niemeyer was aware of the radical nature of his concept of the Negev city and the controversy it would stir in Israel. Still, he hoped that his plan would not be summarily rejected, “but rather would be stored for a time on the shelf and reexamined after a number of years … then I’m sure that the reasons we cite today will be accepted and it will be proven that this city is the inevitable result of progress, of technology and of the life force itself.”
Niemeyer’s plan envisioned a new city somewhere in the heart of the Negev, but no specific site was selected. A model of the plan, as presented at the time, was photographed on the Tel Aviv beach opposite the Dan Hotel, where Niemeyer stayed. Like most of his work in Israel, the Negev city was never built. Elhayani believes that its construction was unfeasible at the time for technological, cultural, social and economic reasons, and that even today it can only serve as an idea for critical review.
Nonetheless, Elhayani writes, the issues Niemeyer raised nearly 40 years ago are at the center of the debate on national planning in Israel today. The question of whether the Negev missed out on – or was saved from – Niemeyer’s ideas remains open.
The proposal by the Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer in the 1960s to build a Negev city with 40 skyscrapers of 30 to 40 stories for tens of thousands of residents is the complete opposite of the settlement project for the Halutza dunes. While Nitzanit, Shlomit and other Halutza communities are planned to be built close to the ground, with low density and spread over a relatively large area per number of residents, Niemeyer’s utopian city was to be vertical, tall, crowded and succinct.
HIS REPUTATION RESTORED AND LIFE EXTENDED TO ITS FULLEST
Mr. Niemeyer is survived by his wife, Vera Lúcia Cabreira, whom he married in 2006; four grandchildren; 13 great-grandchildren; and six great-great-grandchildren, according to the newspaper O Globo. A daughter, Anna Maria, died this year at age 82, and his first wife, Annita Baldo, died in 2004, after 76 years of marriage.
Mr. Niemeyer lived long enough to see his international reputation recover and flourish.
After his return to Brazil in the early 1980s, his office was soon overflowing with new commissions.
At 89, his Museum of Contemporary Art in Niterói, near Rio, which opened in 1996, was celebrated for its bold saucer-shaped form. The building is cantilevered out from sheer rock hovered on a cliffside overlooking Guanabara Bay and the city of Rio de Janeiro.
A decade later, on his 99th birthday, he celebrated the opening of his National Museum and National Library along the Monumental Axis in Brasília, near his cathedral.
In his last years he e designed at least two more buildings in Brasilia, the Memorial dos Povos Indigenas (“Memorial for the Indigenous People”) and the Catedral Militar, Igreja de N.S. da Paz.
A growing number of people had begun to re-examine the legacy of postwar Modernism and appreciate his purist vision as a throwback to a more optimistic time.
In celebrating both the formal elements and social aims of architecture, his work became a symbolic reminder that the body and the mind, the sensual and the rational, are not necessarily in opposition. Yet he also saw sensuality and the brightness of dreams against a darker backdrop. “Humanity needs dreams to be able to survive the miseries of daily existence,” he once said, “even if only for an instant.”
MASTER BUILDER Mr. Niemeyer was among the last of Modernist true believers.More Photos »
foto: reuters/moraes
A recent photo of Niemeyer looking out from a window in his office in Rio.
“Brazil lost today one of its geniuses,” Dilma Rousseff, Brazil’s president, said in a statement issued Wednesday night.
“Few dreamed so intensely, and accomplished so much, as he did.”
Allied with the far left for most of his life, he suffered career setbacks during the rule of Brazil’s right-wing military dictatorships of the 1960s and ’70s, and he was barred from working in the United States during much of the cold war. As Modernism later came under attack for its sometimes dogmatic approach to history, his works were marginalized.
Still, Mr. Niemeyer never stopped working; he churned out major new projects through his 80s and 90s. And as the cold-war divide and architecture’s old ideological battles faded from memory in recent years, a younger generation began embracing his work, intrigued by the consistency of his vision and his ability to achieve voluptuous effects on a heroic scale.
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Niemeyer was a close friend of Fidel Castro, who often visited his apartment and studio whilst in Brazil. Castro was once quoted as saying “Niemeyer and I are the last communists on this planet.” Niemeyer was also regularly visited by Hugo Chavez. Niemeyer was an atheist throughout his life, basing his beliefs both on the “injustices of this world” and on cosmological principles: “It’s a fantastic Universe which humiliates us, and we can’t make any use of it. But we are amazed by the power of the human mind … in the end, that’s it—you are born, you die, that’s it!”. Such views never stopped him from designing religious buildings, which span from small Catholic chapels, through to huge Orthodox churches and large mosques. He also catered to the spiritual beliefs of the public who facilitated his religious buildings. In the Cathedral of Brasília, he intended for the large glass windows “To connect the people to the sky, where their Lord’s paradise is.”
Niemeyer maintained his studio in Rio de Janeiro well into the 21st century. In 2002, the Oscar Niemeyer Museum complex was inaugurated in the city of Curitiba, Paraná.
In 2003, at the age 96, Niemeyer was called to design the Serpentine Gallery Summer Pavilion in Hyde Park London, a gallery that each year invites a famous architect, who has never previously built in the UK, to design this temporary structure. He was still involved in diverse projects at the age of 100, mainly sculptures and readjustments of previous works.
On Niemeyer’s 100th birthday, Russia’s president Vladimir Putin awarded him the Order of Friendship. Grateful for the Prince of Asturias Award of Arts received in 1989, he collaborated on the 25th anniversary of these awards with the donation to Asturias of the design of a cultural centre. The Óscar Niemeyer International Cultural Centre (also known in Spain as Centro Niemeyer), is located in Avilés and was inaugurated in 2011.
In January 2010, the Auditorium Oscar Niemeyer Ravello was officially opened in Ravello, Italy, on the Amalfi Coast. The Auditorium’s concept design, drawings, model, sketches and text were made by Niemeyer in 2000 and completed under the guidance of his friend, Italian sociologist Domenico de Masi. The project was delayed for several years due to objections arising from its design, siting and clear difference from the local architecture; since its inauguration the project has experienced problems and, after one year was still closed.
After reaching the age of 100, Niemeyer spent several periods of time in hospital. In 2009, after a four-week period of hospitalisation for the treatment of gallstones and an intestinal tumour, he was quoted as saying that hospitalization is a “very lonely thing; I needed to keep busy, keep in touch with friends, maintain my rhythm of life.” His daughter and only child, Ana Maria, died of emphysema in June 2012, aged 82.
Niemeyer died of cardiorespiratory arrest on December 5, 2012 at the Hospital Samaritano in Rio de Janeiro, ten days before his 105th birthday. He had been hospitalised with a respiratory infection prior to his death. The BBC‘s obituary of Niemeyer noted that he “built some of the world’s most striking buildings – monumental, curving concrete and glass structures which almost defy description”, also acclaiming him as “one of the most innovative and daring architects of the last 60 years”.
The Washington Post described him as “widely regarded as the foremost Latin American architect of the last century”.
We have watched with astonishment the following happen actually some seven years ago. I say with astonishment because I did eat in what was recommended to me as a private restaurant – in an apartment of private people that did not call it a business. They made me feel of being a guest, and the menu had no marked prices. Instead I was expected to leave money as a present. I thought of it as a ploy that gave returns to the proprietor that were higher then what he could have noted on the menu. On the other hand, the private driver, that would take you in his sputtering 50s long Chevy, was overpricing it and left me with the feeling that he was government connected – sort of the Cuban version of FBI surveillance. Was it a private thing to make sure you did not miss the official highlights, and you did not go out of town to places not on the tourism list?
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News Analysis
How Capitalist Are the Cubans?
Greg Kahn/Getty ImagesA market sells dresses and other items in Havana.
A man in his shoe repair shop in the doorway of his home. New business regulations have allowed thousands of citizens to make money for themselves for the first time since 1959.
IT was just a small sign, red, round and electrified, advertising homemade pizza — the kind of thing no one would notice in New York or Rome. But in Havana? It was mildly amazing.
Cuba, after all, has been dominated for decades by an all-consuming anticapitalist ideology, in which there were only three things promoted on billboards, radio or TV: socialism, nationalism, and Fidel and Raúl Castro. The pizza sign hanging from a decaying colonial building here represented the exact opposite — marketing, the public search for private profit.
And it wasn’t just tossed out there. Unlike the cardboard efforts I’d seen in the same poor neighborhood on a visit to Cuba last year, the sign cost money. It was an investment. It was a clear signal that some of Cuba’s new entrepreneurs — legalized by the government two years ago in a desperate attempt to save the island’s economy — were adapting to the logic of competition and capitalism.
But just how capitalist are Cubans these days? Are they embracing what Friedrich Hayek described as the “self-organizing system of voluntary cooperation,” or resisting?
“It’s a combination,” says Arturo López Levy, a former analyst with the Cuban government now a lecturer at the University of Denver. “When more people get more proactive and more assertive, then other people — whether they like it or not — have to do the same. They have to compete. I think that’s the dynamic.”
Indeed, like Iraq, Russia, Mexico or other countries that experienced decades of dictatorial rule that eventually ended, Cuba today is a society marked by years of abuse, divided and uncertain about its future. The changes of the past few years — allowing for self-employment, freer travel, and the buying and selling of homes and cars — have been both remarkable and extremely limited. The reasons small things like signs matter so much here is because everyone is concerned with momentum, and no one seems to know whether Cuba is really on the road to capitalism, as The Economist asserted in March, or if the island is destined to simply sputter along, with restrained capitalism for a few and socialist subsistence for the rest.
The debate is all the more complicated because the same leaders who rejected capitalism for so long are now the ones trying to encourage people to try it out. Raúl Castro was notoriously the revolution’s most loyal Communist; now, as the country’s president, he is the main booster for free market reforms. On one hand, a recent gathering of Cuba’s Communist Party earlier this year included a session on overcoming prejudices against entrepreneurs; on the other, Raúl Castro has said he would “never permit the return of the capitalist system.”
“They are kind of schizophrenic,” says Ted Henken, a Cuba expert at Baruch College. “They are saying they are changing, but they treat these things as gifts and not as rights.”
And yet, there is no longer any denying that pockets of controlled capitalism are emerging in Cuba. In Havana, in particular, small businesses are everywhere. Entire urban industries, including taxis and restaurants, are being transformed through a rush of new entrants, who are increasing competition for customers, labor and materials. Even the most elemental tasks that used to be managed by the state — such as buying food — are increasingly in the hands of a private system that sets its own prices based on supply and demand.
Though the initial burst of activity has slowed, some experts say the explosion in commerce showed just how capitalist Cubans were all along. Of the roughly 350,000 people licensed to be self-employed under the new laws by the end of 2011, 67 percent had no prior job affiliation listed — which most likely means they were running underground businesses that then became legitimate.
Some of the most successful entrepreneurs are optimistic about Cuba’s becoming more open to free market ideas. Héctor Higuera Martínez, 39, the owner of Le Chansonnier, one of Havana’s finest restaurants (the duck is practically Parisian), says that officials are “starting to realize there is a reason to support private businesses.” He has given people work, for example, and he brings in hard currency from foreigners, including Americans.
“Before, we had nothing,” he said. “Now we have an opportunity.”
He is doing everything he can to make the most of it. When we met one night at the restaurant, he had already written up several pages of notes and charts explaining what his industry needed to grow — from wholesale markets to improved transportation for farmers to an end to the American trade embargo to changes in the Cuban tax code. In an ingeniously cobbled-together kitchen, in which only one of three ovens worked, he mostly seemed to salivate at the thought of vacuum packing so his meals could be delivered more efficiently.
He was about as capitalist as it gets. But will his ideas ever be adopted? Like everyone else, he faces severe limits. He can hire no more than 20 employees, for example. He does not have access to private bank loans, and the government has shown little inclination to let people like Mr. Higuera succeed on a grand scale.
Instead, when success arrives, the government seems to get nervous. This past summer, officials shut down a thriving restaurant and cabaret featuring opera and dance in what had been a vacant lot, charging the owner with “personal enrichment” because he charged a $2 cover at the door. A news article from Reuters had described it as Cuba’s largest private business. A few days later, it was gone, along with 130 jobs.
The Castro government has tried to keep a lid on innovation in other ways, too. It has not allowed professionals like lawyers and architects to work for themselves. And its efforts at political repression have focused over the past few years on innovative young people seeking space for civil discourse in public and online — the blogger Yoani Sánchez, or Antonio Rodiles, director of an independent project called Estado de Sats, who was arrested in early November and released last week after 18 days in jail.
So for now, what Cuba has ended up with is handcuffed capitalism: highly regulated competitive markets for low-skilled, small family businesses. What economic freedom there is has mostly accrued to those whose main ambition is making and selling pizza.
Which again raises the question: is Cuba really heading toward capitalism or not? Skeptics are easy to find. “Every place in the world that has had real change, it has changed because the regime itself has allowed some significant openings and the door has been pushed wide open,” says Senator Robert Menendez, Democrat of New Jersey. “That’s not what’s happening here.”
Many Cubans say they are hesitant to let go of a reliable system summed up by a common joke: “We pretend to work, they pretend to pay us.” Taxi drivers told Mr. López Levy that they were working harder for less money because of increased competition. A farmer I met at the wholesale market outside Havana equated capitalism with higher prices, and said that the government needed to intervene.
But mostly, this is an aging crowd and Mr. López Levy — who still has friends and relatives in government — says that even among Cuban bureaucrats, the mentality is changing. If so, more capitalism may be inevitable. Because with every new entrepreneur it licenses, Cuba becomes less socialist, less exceptional, less of a bearded rebel raising its fist against the horrors of Yankee capitalism. In the eyes of some Cubans, the jig is already up.
“The government has lost the ideological battle,” said Óscar Espinosa Chepe, a state-trained economist who was sent to jail in 2003 for criticizing the government. “The battle for ideas was the most important battle, and they’ve lost.”
Damien Cave is a New York Times correspondent based in Mexico City.
PORT-OF-SPAIN—October 26, 2012—The Government of Trinidad and Tobago is co-hosting a meeting of developing country negotiators with the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD), the CARICOM Secretariat and the South Centre, to share information and develop strategies that further common development goals.
The Sixth Annual Forum of Developing Country Investment Negotiators takes place in Port-of-Spain from October 29-31, 2012, and is expected to draw over 70 participants from Africa, Asia and Latin America and the Caribbean, representing over 30 countries.
Several regional and international organizations are also attending, including the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), the Commonwealth Secretariat, the Caribbean Association of Investment Promotion Agencies (CAIPA), the Southern African Development Community (SADC) and the UN Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA).
The theme of this year’s event is “understanding and harnessing new models for investment and sustainable development”.
The forum is part of an ongoing effort to help developing countries incorporate sustainable development issues into their international investment treaty negotiations, such as those now underway between CARICOM and Canada.
This year’s forum focuses on how to ensure the developmental goals and objectives of developing countries are promoted by international, regional and bilateral investment agreements.
The forum builds upon the successes of the five previous forums held in Singapore (2007), Morocco (2008), Ecuador (2009), India (2010) and Uganda (2011).
This event responds to a growing demand from developing countries for a counterbalance to the OECD Investment Committee as a place for developed country negotiators and policy-makers on investment. The forums have created a space for developing countries to freely consider and develop their own negotiating priorities and goals in relation to international investment treaties.
For over ten years, IISD has been providing technical assistance to investment negotiators across the developing world and the demand for our services has been growing in recent years. In order to maximize the sharing of experience—positive and negative—IISD decided to convene an annual forum of investment negotiators from developing countries.
This is the first time the annual forum will be held in the Caribbean region.
CARACAS, Oct 4 2012 (IPS) – Sunday’s elections in Venezuela will determine whether the era of President Hugo Chávez’s Bolivarian revolution will continue or come to an end. The result will have an impact not only on this country but on the rest of Latin America.
In the first decade of this century, Latin America saw “a nontraumatic epochal change, sometimes manifested as constituent assemblies (to rewrite a constitution), which sought to respond to the demands of the majority and bring about political change. Chávez is its most radical expression,” said Manuel Felipe Sierra, an analyst from the traditional left and a critic of the Venezuelan president.
“This trend, which Chávez claims to have authored although it has roots and leadership in each country, has already passed, and most governments have taken a more conventional democratic route with left-wing overtones,” he told IPS.
In the campaign, Capriles said that if elected, he would maintain membership of all the blocs, including ALBA.
However, he declared that there would be an end to the “freebies” and not a single barrel of oil would leave Venezuela for free, in a country where oil now represents 93 percent of exports, compared to 70 percent in 1998. He was referring to the agreements with countries in the region for oil and gas sales at preferential prices and on easy payment terms.
Asked who would lose the most in the region if Chávez lost, the analysts who spoke to IPS agreed that the Cuban and Nicaraguan governments would be most affected, because they are the most dependent on Venezuelan oil and other resources. “Argentina, Bolivia and Ecuador would not be happy, either,” said Shifter.
Capriles promised to maintain good relations with Cuba, and said he would seek a meeting with Cuban President Raúl Castro after he meets with Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, his priority, and Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos.
But he said the current agreements, under which Havana receives between three billion and four billion dollars a year, must be revised.
Chávez, for his part, insists that if he is ousted from the presidency, “darkness will return to Latin American society” and “the empire (the U.S.) will win.”
In Sierra’s view, “Venezuela has a specific weight in the region, as the only country that is structurally a Latin American oil power, even though others also have oil, and it must recover that role and restore it to normal, whatever happens on Sunday.”
Bolivia and Ecuador are other examples of this current, which has as its political integration mechanism the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA), led by Venezuela and made up of eight Latin American and Caribbean countries, including Cuba and Nicaragua.
But the regional reform movement has another major reference point, less ideological and radical: the process led by former Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (2003-2011), whose programme was based on economic growth with social inclusion and a strengthening of democracy.
Both self-described left-wing and right-wing governments have expressed their support for the Brazilian model, including Venezuela’s opposition candidate Henrique Capriles, who declares himself an “admirer and imitator” of Lula.
Capriles, supported by a variegated mix of 29 groups ranging from right to left, points as proof to the Zero Hunger plan he implemented as governor of the northwestern state of Miranda, modelled on Brazil’s anti-hunger strategy.
Most of the latest polls tip Chávez as the favourite to be re-elected for a third time. But growing support for his rival has made the election result uncertain.
Chávez’s style of diplomacy in Latin America has been one of confrontation with right-wing presidents, which polarised countries, governments and summits ever since he took power in February 1999, said experts consulted by IPS, including several close to the president.
“The export of the Bolivarian model, supported by the abusive use of Venezuela’s oil wealth, as well as Chávez´s style, are in decline, whatever happens on Sunday,” said Sierra.
“Furthermore, there is ‘Chávez fatigue’ in the region because of the behaviours and manners that stress even his allies, and that ceased to be useful for the collective interest,” he said.
But Roy Chaderton, Venezuela’s ambassador to the Organisation of American States (OAS), said that if Chávez exits the stage, “it would threaten Latin American independence,” especially from the United States, which Chávez refers to as “the empire.”
Chaderton said Venezuela had created in the region “a diversity of dependences, that make us more independent of others and more interdependent among ourselves.”
“In Latin America we created oxygen valves that help us breathe more freely, and that would close off” if Chávez loses, he said.
“These are not just any elections, for Venezuela or for the continent, because of the ideological primacy and polarisation promoted by Chávez, and because if he loses the elections it would confirm the demise of the left-wing neo-populist experiment he was trying to export,” said Teresa Romero, an expert in international relations.
In Romero’s view, even if Chávez is re-elected, “the regional climate has shifted towards the centre,” and within it “Brazil has won the leadership role, with progressive positions that are less strident and more efficient.”
Michael Shifter, the head of the Inter-American Dialogue, a U.S. think tank, said if Chávez left the government it would have “an enormous effect on the regional political scenario, because he has been the most aggressive and polarising voice in the hemisphere over the last decade.”
If change comes to Venezuela, “ideological conflicts will not disappear, but they will be less acute and better channeled,” he told IPS. In his view, Capriles would maintain normal relations with left-wing governments like those of Argentina, Bolivia, Cuba, Ecuador and Nicaragua, “but not, as the phrase went in the 1990s, such carnal relationships.”
In addition to ALBA, the Chávez government promoted the foundation of the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR), made up of the region’s 12 countries, and the oil aid organisation Petrocaribe. It also helped create the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) as an alternative to the OAS, which it considers to be dominated by Washington.
In August the government began a process of withdrawal from the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, which hands down binding rulings on human rights violations committed by states. The only precedent for withdrawal from the OAS human rights court was that of Peru, 20 years ago, during the regime of Alberto Fujimori (1990-2000).
Capriles announced that, if he were elected, one of his first steps would be to reverse the process of withdrawal from the Inter-American Court. He also said Venezuela would rejoin the Andean Community, the regional bloc that this country belonged to since the 1960s, which the Chávez administration pulled out of in 2011. It is currently made up of Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru.
Chávez’s efforts in the past six years were directed towards Venezuela becoming a full member of the Southern Common Market (Mercosur) trade bloc, which he finally achieved in June, after Paraguay’s temporary suspension from the group, made up also of Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay.
“These are changes of alliances based on political and ideological foundations, not on economic reasoning or geographical location,” Sierra said.
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And from the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) backgrounder:
The October 7 presidential election between Hugo Chavez and Henrique Capriles Radonski holds significant implications for the direction of the country’s “socialist revolution,” its economy, and foreign policy. Read the Backgrounder »
AS Hugo Chávez, the icon of Latin America’s left, struggles to hang on to his job, it’s tempting to read tomorrow’s closely contested election in Venezuela as a possible signal of the region’s return to the right. That would be a mistake, because the question that’s been roiling Latin America for a dozen years isn’t “left or right?” but “which left?”
Outsiders have often interpreted Latin America’s swing to the left over the last dozen years as a movement of leaders marching in ideological lock step. But within the region, the fault lines have always been clear.
Radical revolutionary regimes in Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia and Nicaragua joined Cuba, the granddaddy of the far left, in a bloc determined to confront the capitalist world, even if that meant increasingly authoritarian government.
A more moderate set of leaders in Brazil, Uruguay and Guatemala put forth an alternative: reducing poverty through major social reforms without turning their backs on democratic institutions or private property rights.
As Fidel Castro’s favorite son, Mr. Chávez has always been the leader of the radical wing. And Brazil’s size and economic power made it the natural leader of the reformist wing.
Outwardly, the two camps have been at pains to deny that any divisions exist. There have been many pious words of solidarity and lots of regional integration accords. But behind closed doors, each side is often viciously dismissive of the other, with Chávez supporters seeing the Brazilians as weak-kneed appeasers of the bourgeoisie while the Brazilians sneer at Mr. Chávez’s outdated radicalism and chronic incompetence.
As recently as five or six years ago, there was a real ideological contest. A wildly unpopular American president prone to military adventurism helped Mr. Chávez rally the continent against Washington. One country after the next joined the radical axis. First Bolivia, then Nicaragua, Honduras and Ecuador, joined a growing roll call of radicals in 2005 and 2006.
Now the political landscape is almost entirely transformed. Barack Obama’s 2008 victory badly undermined the radicals’ ability to rally opposition to gringo imperialism. Meanwhile, the alternative was becoming increasingly attractive.
Brazil’s remarkable success in reducing poverty speaks for itself. Building on a foundation of macroeconomic stability and stable democratic institutions, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who was Brazil’s president from 2003 to 2010, oversaw the most remarkable period of social mobility in Latin America’s living memory.
As millions of Brazilians rose into the middle class, Mr. Chávez’s autocratic excesses came to look unnecessary and inexcusable to Venezuelans. Mr. da Silva and his successor, Dilma Rousseff, have shown that a country does not need to stack the courts, purge the army and politicize the central bank to fight poverty. Brazil proves that point, quietly, day in and day out.
It isn’t just democratic institutions that have suffered from Mr. Chávez’s radicalism; it’s the economy, too. Venezuela’s traditional dependence on oil exports has deepened, with 96 percent of export revenue now coming from the oil industry, up from 67 percent just before Mr. Chávez took office. Nationalized steel mills produce a fraction of the steel they’re designed for, forcing the state to import the difference. And nationalized electric utilities plunge most of the country into darkness several times a week. The contrast with Brazil’s high-tech, entrepreneurial, export-oriented economy couldn’t be more stark.
For all of Mr. Chávez’s talk of radical transformation, Venezuela’s child mortality and adult literacy statistics have not improved any faster under his government than they did over the several decades before he rose to power.
With oversight institutions neutered, the president now runs the country as a personal fief: expropriating businesses on a whim and deciding who goes to jail. Judges who rule against the government’s wishes are routinely fired, and one has even been jailed. Chávez-style socialism looks like the worst of both worlds: both more authoritarian and less effective at reducing poverty than the Brazilian alternative.
And the region has noticed. The key moment came in April 2011, when Ollanta Humala won the Peruvian presidency. Long seen as the most radical of Latin America’s new breed of leaders, Mr. Humala had run on a Chávez-style platform in 2006 and lost. By last year, he’d seen the way the wind was blowing and remade himself into a Brazilian-style moderate, won and proceeded to govern — so far, successfully — in the Brazilian mold.
Now, in a final indignity, Mr. Chávez is facing a tight re-election race against Henrique Capriles Radonski, a 40-year-old progressive state governor who extols the virtues of the Brazilian model.
Although Mr. Chávez’s government has done its best to paint a caricature of Mr. Capriles as an old-style right-wing oligarch, he is unmistakably within the Brazilian center-left mold: Mr. Capriles pitches himself as an ambitious but pragmatic social reformer committed to ending the Chávez era’s authoritarian excesses.
The rest of Latin America has already been through the ideological battle in which Venezuela remains mired. By and large, other nations have made their choices. The real question in this election is whether Venezuela will join the hemispheric consensus now, or later.
Francisco Toro is a journalist, political scientist and blogger.
High Level Debate organized by UNESCO at the International Day of Peace, United Nations Headquarters,
September 21st, 2012
The presentation by H.E. Leonel Fernández, former President of the Dominican Republic
and President of Global Foundation of Democracy and Development, FUNGLODE
Your Excellency Ban Ki-moon, Secretary-General of the United Nations;
Your Excellency Vuk Jeremic, President of the 67th session of the United Nations General Assembly;
Honorable Irina Bokova, Director-General of UNESCO;
Distinguished panelists;
Distinguished ambassadors;
Ladies and Gentlemen:
In celebrating World Peace Day today, we arrived to this High Level Debate organized by UNESCO here, in New York, preceded by a week of violence, threats and dreadful unrest in different parts of the world.
What has mostly caught our attention, however, was the amateur video about the Prophet Muhammad put in circulation by an individual, through the use of modern new media, that sparked a wave of riots, protests and killings in different countries of the Arab world.
Reflecting on the occurrence of these regrettable events, we need to analyze from a fresh perspective the role of the media and its impact in an environment of continuous and accelerated technological change, within an interconnected and culturally diverse planet.
In his classical work, titled, Public Opinion, the great American journalist and political philosopher, Walter Lippman, refers to the fact that in 1914, before the outbreak of World War I a group of French, German, British, Italian and Russian citizens, were living in a friendly and peaceful way, ignoring that what was to become the great war had begun among their respective nations in Europe.
Months later, a ship arrived in the island, bringing newspapers and magazines with the news of the events that had taken place in what traditionally has been called “the cradle of civilization”.
Right there, violence broke out and a war began between those that previous to the spreading of the bleak news, had friendly and peaceful ties.
In the video about the Prophet Muhammad, there are lessons to be drawn of symbolic significance to a culture of peace, tolerance and understanding, in the midst of religious and cultural diversity.
First, it is not only that a conflict of anywhere can spread conflict everywhere, as has been analyzed by a range of influential social thinkers, but that now, because of the information and communications technology revolution, for the first time in history, any individual in any part of the world can become a media content provider.
That means, that from being a passive receiver of information, the individual can now play the active role of a transmitter, making modern communication more interactive.
Furthermore, there is no longer need to wait for the boat to arrive to generate a collective behavioral reaction.
Now, it is instantaneous communication, with news cycles going 24/7.
Third, in relation to the showing of the video, government officials reacted by stating that even though they rejected and disapproved its content, they could not ban its distribution for respect of freedom of expression.
There, of course, seems to be a contradiction in the argument. If something is considered legal, it shouldn’t be the object of moral repudiation.
I think we can all agree that freedom of expression and the free flow of ideas do not necessarily mean that there are no limits to their exercise.
In different national legislations, due to libel, slander, defamation, calumny and character assassination, limits has been drawn, beyond which infringement, misdeed or violation are considered.
If this can be achieved at the national level, why not consider the possibility of drafting an international legal framework, legally binding to member states of the UN, that can prohibit and punish blasphemy as the act of insulting or showing contempt or lack of reverence toward something considered sacred?
In this second decade of the 21st century, the world has continued, at an accelerated pace, its transition from an industrial to a knowledge-based society, in which information and communication technology play a distinctive role.
Given the fact that it is in the interest of UNESCO to harness the media and ICTs, to promote peace, non-violence, tolerance and intercultural dialogue, it would be of significant value to consider including in its new Program of Action for a Culture of Peace and Non-Violence, a new international legal approach to the use of cyberspace and global digital media.
In addition, supporting and promoting creative new projects, with the active participation of youths around the world, in the areas of filmmaking, theatre, performing arts, sports, radio and television programs, oriented towards peace, non-violence and cultural diversity.
In that way, the media, instead of being perceived as an instrument at the service of hatred and insult to human dignity and cherished religious beliefs, can become the ideal catalyst for peace, knowledge, understanding, solidarity and pluralism in a new world order characterized for being borderless, wireless and interconnected.
It will depend on our ability and commitment to make it either “Brightnet.com” or “Darknet.com”.
(Photo: 
Click to enlarge
David Stillman
Slide Show
Haifa University
Kikar Hamedina, Tel Aviv
foto: reuters/moraes
Greg Kahn/Getty ImagesA market sells dresses and other items in Havana.
