Toban Black is a Sociology Phd student, a weblogger, a photographer, and a community organizer based in London, Ontario. Post-Carbon London is his primary organizing commitment.
Articles by Toban Black
An invitation from the Mobilization for Climate Justice coalition
Smartmeme recently released a video that introduces emerging climate justice organizing and activism. The video points viewers toward the Mobilization for Climate Justice coalition web site (actforclimatejustice.org), which serves as an online hub for projects with similar concerns and goals.
The US-based Mobilization for Climate Justice coalition was formed by various organizations, which are calling on others to help build a “climate justice movement that emphasizes non-violent direct action and public education to mobilize for effective and just solutions to the climate crisis.”
Bringing together forthright principles and on-the-ground actions, the coalition organizes around three key goals. These organizers urge others to join them:
1) To build a global movement for climate justice that encourages urgent action to avoid catastrophic climate change, and which addresses the root social, ecological, political and economic causes of the climate crisis toward a total systemic transformation of our society.
2) To promote and strengthen the rights and voices of Indigenous and other affected peoples, (including workers in energy-intensive industries) in climate mitigation and adaptation strategies.
3) To expose the consequences of false and market-based climate ‘solutions’ as well as corporate domination of climate negotiations, while advancing alternatives that can provide real and just solutions and which protect biodiversity.
This climate justice organizing draws from prior environmental justice critiques and activism, as well as wider opposition towards corporations, and other international market structures. While focusing on global warming—as a consequence and a cause of injustices and market structures—climate justice organizers also are responding to other interrelated impacts of established energy systems. Here in Ontario, a climate justice group will be waging a campaign against various pollution from tar sands projects—while other climate justice organizers oppose mountaintop removal mining explosions, oil refinery pollution, biofuel land grabs, and a range of other interconnected devastation around prevailing energy systems.
Like other climate organizers, the climate justice coalition is focusing on the upcoming UN Climate Conference in Copenhagen (COP-15) this December. Climate justice activists will be calling on others to follow and weigh in on those negotiations—if only to question the legitimacy of the proposals or the participants.
The coalition has called a major day of action at the end of November (“N30″), but activism associated with the coalition already is underway (as you can see on their web site). Some of these related actions will be connected with the coalition more than others. Since the coalition is calling on others to take on the same concerns and strategies, it will be difficult to track where the actual coalition begins and ends. In other words, anyone who wants to join us will find many grassroots points of entry into climate justice activism.
Glimpsing a history of anti-nuclear activism
Peace monuments can be found in some strange places. During a recent trip to Cardiff, Wales, a statue in the entrance way to the rather lavish Renaissance-styled City Hall caught my eye as I was visiting a collection of official buildings and public spaces.
The doves and the peace symbol there suggested some sort of anti-war message or references. I then noticed the plaque, which reads, “Her soul ignited goodness on our nuclear land; The burning bush of her sacrifice and faith will never be extinguished.” But with no apparent link to historical events, the significance of this particular statue was lost on me at the time.
After seeing the write-up in the Cardiff City Hall Visitor Information Guide, I began to understand how the statue and plaque are linked back to anti-nuclear civil disobedience at a military base in Berkshire, England. The text and the imagery at the monument actually are references to the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.
As a Canadian visitor, I came to the monument with almost no grasp of the Greenham Common references. Since my trip to Cardiff, I have investigated and reflected on what I saw there.
In a write-up about the monument, the Cardiff City Hall Visitor Information Guide indicates that:
On the 27th of August 1981, a total of 36 women, four babies and six men set off on a march from Cardiff to RAF Greenham Common in Berkshire. The protest march was against the American ground launched cruise nuclear missiles to be located at the RAF base on Greenham Common. The site then became a world famous icon for protests against nuclear weapons.
The Visitor Information Guide also quotes Thalia Campbell, a Greenham Common protestor who has said that “this statue is of a woman, who is every woman from all over the world who took part in Greenham” and “she was the spark that rekindled the Peace Movement.” Read the rest of this article »
Indigenous and water rights activists protest Canadian landfill
Various campaigners have united to oppose plans for a partially constructed dump site in the Canadian Township of Tiny, just north of Toronto, in Simcoe County. The campaigners who are opposing these landfill site plans have focused on the water contamination that would result from dumping waste on an underground aquifer that runs into the Great Lakes. Provincial and county officials have situated the dump site on the Alliston Aquifer—which otherwise would serve as an exceptionally clean water source. The indigenous inhabitants at three nearby reservations are among the potential victims whose water would be contaminated if the landfill site is completed and used.
The Native Women’s Association of Canada has stressed how the potential dump site “is in close proximity to three First Nations reserves; Rama, Georgina Island and Beausoleil, and it is also the traditional harvesting area of the Métis Nation. Aboriginal peoples have not been consulted about the development of this garbage dump site.” In May, Vicki Monague—an indigenous campaign leader—wrote that:
We have been receiving the support of well over 40 non-native local community members all weekend long who have taken part in our Water Ceremonies and our Songs from the Drum. To my knowledge, this is the first time in Canada that the Non-Native People and First Nations have taken a stand in this region, side-by-side, against the levels of Government. We will continue to stand unified with our White Brothers and Sisters against Site 41.
Our voices have also been heard by Native Elders in Utah and California and we are quickly gaining support from other First Nation communities. Our Sacred Fire has been lit and will continue to burn until our demands are met. We are now inviting all First Nations People in Canada to come and take part in our Peaceful Protest of Site 41. Your First Nations Women need your support. We are going to protect our Heritage Land! Read the rest of this article »
Toronto’s “garbage strike” elicits public outrage and labour disunity
The city of Toronto has been caught up in a labour dispute since June 22—when 24,000 municipal workers from two local branches of the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) went on strike. After six months of negotiations, paramedics, social service workers, and various other municipal employees walked off the job to reject city officials’ demands for concessions. Benefits for older workers and sick pay policy have been major sticking points during this collective bargaining.
The most contentious aspect of this strike, however, has revolved around Toronto’s waste collection services. When sanitation workers joined the municipal strike, many residents had to adjust to interim measures. In Toronto, the sidewalk waste bins have been taped shut, and the usual curbside services have been replaced with temporary dump sites, which are scattered across the city. It would be an enormous understatement to say that this “garbage strike” has overshadowed the wider economic issues in and around the municipal labour dispute. Some consider the waste work stoppage, alone, an outrageous disaster.
Toronto's mayor on the cover of Maclean's magazine
The coverage in Maclean’s magazine is one notable response to this “garbage strike.” As a widely-circulated Canadian publication, Maclean’s is seen on store shelves across the country. The tabloid-style mockery on the cover is a departure for this publication, which usually maintains an air of seriousness.
Unfortunately, such coverage is consistent with various other shrill and counter-productive responses conveyed by Canadian media outlets. From the beginning, a barrage of hostility and panic has been flung at the sanitation workers and the city government. On the third day of the strike, Toronto Star columnist Royson James reported that “talk radio was abuzz with outraged citizens, in full fume over having to wait an hour to dump waste at city transfer stations. Electronic news outlets feed the beast with provocative web polls. And newspaper websites stoke the fires.”
News of Toronto’s labour tensions has even found its way into American media. According to The Canadian Press, the mayor of Toronto “went on CNN last week to urge American tourists to visit the city after an article in the San Francisco Chronicle made Toronto seem like a hazardous vacation destination,” actually rating it worse than notoriously troubled regions like Honduras, Mexico, North Africa and Thailand. As one Toronto writer put it, “Apparently, vacationers being falsely imprisoned, an outbreak of bubonic plague, a surge in the number of cases of dengue fever and the overthrow of a government and all the upheaval that entails, pales in comparison to a strike by municipal workers in the City of Toronto.”
Read the rest of this article »
