Throwing Bodies on the Gears

The UK group Leave It In the Ground has had a busy week. First, they hijacked a coal train headed for Drax, reportedly Britain's largest coal-fired power plant. Check out the Guardian's video of the action here. Yesterday, they occupied a structure in Derbyshire that sits upon a site where UK Coal wants to develop an open cast (open pit) mine: 1 million tons of coal extracted in 5 years. As Mario Savio famously intoned, " There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop." (1964)

Sticking with this theme, here's an al-Jazeera report from the recent Xingu Forever Alive Encounter, a huge gathering of Amazonian peoples with a 'no compromise' position towards stopping construction of the Belo Monte Dam on the Xingu River. According to International Rivers, there are 5 dams planned for this basin: the main hydroplant and 4 smaller dams to create holding basins. According to a report from Root Force:

Eletrobras representative, Paulo Fernando Vieira Souto Rezende spoke of the need for new dams to meet increasing electric demand in Brazil. During his speech, non-indigenous farmers and river dwellers became angry and began to chant and boo. When the speech was finished, a group of indigenous women and warriors rushed the stage, brandishing machetes and war clubs. The apologist for genocide was shoved to the ground and poked with a machete, cutting his arm. He was pulled away by conference organizers and taken to a hospital.

Another conference report quotes one chief as saying: “We ask you to tell (president) Lula that we will not accept dams on the Xingu. If they try to build dams, there will be war.” So, there it is. Indigenous peoples staking their position against the progress (as opposed to progressive) agendas of South America's self-proclaimed Bolívarian leaders.

Elsewhere, at the juncture connecting the two american continents, it seems that the US company AES plans to move forward in building three hydroelectric projects in Panama that are certain to totally devastate a World Heritage Site, the Amistad International Park, and displace two indigenous tribes, the Naso and Ngobe. While the Guardian recently ran a story looking at the 'march of progress' as seen through the eyes of the Naso King and members of his tribe, i also found this overview of the area here, centered around the Proyecto ODESEN ecology center. In a letter from the Ngobe tribe to AES sent back in late 2007, they stated:

El bloqueo del río eliminará de manera efectiva una porción importante de nuestros peces y camarones, porque unas ocho y once especies de ellos necesitan poder moverse entre el rio y el mar para poder sobrevivir. Las represas van ha impedir este movimiento migratorio. Además, las represas van a inundar vastas áreas del territorio donde vivimos.

(Blockage of the river will eliminate an important portion of our fish and shrimps, because 81 of these species need to be able to move between the river and the sea in order to survive. The dams are going to infinge upon this migratory movement. Furthermore, they will flood huge areas of the territory in which we live. - my translation, pls excuse any errors)

Now the Naso are in their 7th month of a blocade against another dam being planned by Colombian electric firm Empresas Públicas de Medellín (EMP). Late last month, the blocade was attacked by paramilitary forces - if you read spanish, lots more information about this situation can be found here.

So friends, it's the same story over and over. Choose hydro over coal for cleaner air, nuclear over biofuels to prevent mass starvation, off-shore oil rigs to mitigate the biofuels controversy, GMOs to protect food crops from large scale drought and infestation... and always the indigenous people, who've managed to sustain themselves since time immemorial without any of this stuff, are being pushed off their lands, their co-evolutionary survival knowledge dying out along with their cultures. i spent 4 months living in a cave once, on top of a mountain overlooking the Wadi Araba (when i become more adept at Google Earth, i'll zero in on it for you). That was before the age of laptops and internet, before everyone had a cell phone, before i myself felt compelled to maintain a stock of 4 different hair conditioners. It wasn't a perfect life, i'll give you that - no showers, books, etc - but it was certainly a sustainable life from a kinetic point of view and compared to how i live now, i'm not sure that the imbalance comes out on the side of the present. In the Americas, i would say for certain that it does not.... just something to think about, because the struggles of these native peoples are the direct result of our refusal to do what they have already mastered.