 Hi everyone. Thanks so much. This is like a full room. So thanks so much for coming to my talk. I'm really, really glad to be here for Unity through Diversity Week. And you know, the other thing as Sean was mentioning in the introduction, actually my mom taught here at Highline College, you know, almost 30 years ago. She taught Spanish here. So I feel really honored to be here again, you know. It's a nice coincidence. Okay, so the topic of my discussion today is, as you can see here, struggles across borders resisting climate breakdown and state violence. And so you might notice that I'm using the word climate breakdown as opposed to climate change. And the reason for this is that I think that this describes our situation more accurately than simply climate change. Climate change kind of implies like a passive process, like it's kind of happening, it's kind of like a natural process. But what's actually happening is that the climate is at risk of breaking down entirely. So I'm going to split up my comments in three parts. I'm going to give a theoretical introduction about this problem. I'm going to give some examples of cross-border resistance, both against environmental destruction and against state violence. And try to answer this very important question, which is how is it that we can resist these trends toward environmental destruction, you know, reassert our power collectively and remake our world so as to actually stave off this horrible threat that we are facing? So I want to begin by discussing borders and sovereignty. And I'm going to give some examples through my life and my work. I just want to mention them here. So No Más Muertes or No More Deaths is a group on the border with Arizona and Mexico. CIPAS is the International Service for Peace, where I worked in Mexico almost ten years ago for a year. And then Palestine, I was there for six months in the West Bank. Syria, I've never been to Syria, but I have been involved with solidarity movements with the people of Syria in the last few years. So I want to just give, as I said, a theoretical introduction to this problem. So in order to understand what's going on with the environment and the climate, I think we really need to look at the institutions that are governing our society, right? So I want to just begin by discussing what is the state? The state, it's another word for government. And it's really actually a very recent invention. It goes back to the Treaty of Westphalia in Europe, 1648. So states can be said to basically be institutions that govern a given territory. As the sociologist Max Weber said, states have a monopoly over the effective use of force, or the legitimate use of force within a given territory. So if you think about the police or the military, this is what Weber is getting at. And in general, the state is a pyramidal social institution. We can say it is not an egalitarian or collective one. Rather, there is a concentration at the top of power, and a small group of people basically decide politics for the rest of the country and of the world. So I just want to, you know, pose the question, like, do you see any borders here? No, right? I mean, borders are entirely arbitrary. You know, if you look at the U.S.-Mexico border with Texas, there is the Rio Grande, for example. There's many different rivers and mountain ranges and things that throughout history have served as like an effective boundary or border. But when we talk about borders, we're talking about a specific social institution, and we're talking about the state. So, I mean, borders are arbitrary. As you can see here, it's just another representation of the same thing. Okay, and then the second main social institution I want to talk about here today is capitalism, right? And capitalism describes our economy, how it is that we organize production, consumption, distribution, and so on. So, of course, capitalism doesn't mean the economy. Rather, if we look at human history, you know, from Mesopotamia to the present, and even before all of that happened, before the state even arose with agriculture in the Middle East several thousand years ago. So, we see that capitalism is a specific form of economy, right? And it's organized around the principle of profit. That is to say making more money than you spend in a given business operation, right? And so, there is some debate about when it is that this economic system began. Some historians say that it began with 1492 when Columbus, quote-unquote, discovered the New World, or you can also say the early 1600s. And I just want to give two definitions for trying to understand what capitalism is. The first comes from Carl Polanyi in The Great Transformation. This book, he basically discusses how capitalism is unique as a market economy in history, in human history, because in capitalism the market, and if you think about, you know, the Middle East or Indigenous societies here, or Europe and the Middle Ages, all of these societies before capitalism, of course in many cases they had markets. That's to say you go to the market to get food or artisan, whatever, you know, whatever good you want. That doesn't mean by itself that you have capitalism. So, what Polanyi's point was is that capitalism basically enshrines the economy throughout the entire world, right? And so Habermas, who is a German critical theorist, talks about this as the colonization of the life world. Basically that the economy takes over all of society rather than just being restricted to one aspect of life as in, you know, as in previous times. And then of course Carl Marx in his very famous Capitao Volume 1 defines capitalism as an economy that is based on the exploitation and the commodification of labor. That is to say that capitalism requires the worker to be subordinate to the boss. That is the basic relationship of capitalism. And capitalism can only come about once the commons have been destroyed. Let me explain that. So in England in the 16th century and even before then, there was, and throughout the world in fact, in Mexico and many places, there is such a concept of the commons or common property, collective property, right? So if you think about like grazing with cattle and so on, in England many of the poor peasants had a large area of land where they could take their cattle to just graze commonly. And there wasn't any, no one was owning that land or anything. However, capitalism once it came about basically required the destruction of all those common lands. And that's how you did in fact have capitalism emerging in England in the 1600s and 1700s. That is to say the ruling class of England imposed these laws where the common property was all privatized by the rich. So that the peasantry and the poor people could not rely on those resources anymore. Instead they had to be subjected to the worker, if you see what I'm, excuse me, to the capitalist, to the boss. So they had to become workers. So that is the whole point of capitalism. And so what's the relationship between these two things I've been discussing? What's the relationship between capitalism and the state? Arguably the two do reinforce each other. We have some examples we can think of like the arms trade for example, which is one of the most profitable trades in the entire world. That's a good example also wars. If you think of all the wars that the states of the world, all the governments of the world, you know, do, that actually serves the arms manufacturers, people who make money off of wars. So the state and capitalism do serve each other in that way. They're both pyramidal social institutions, right? So capitalism is a class society where there's the rich. In theory there's a middle class, although, you know, in fact as we probably have noticed over the last 30 years, that middle class is really shrinking. And then of course there's the vast majority of the population being workers, right? And so, and you know, we have the phenomenon of capitalist media, right? Like the television, all these things, how the way that education works, a lot of different cultural aspects of capitalist society actually arguably are programmed so as to continue to serve that same system, right? So you have the capitalist media, like the mass media, promoting nationalism, you know, sexism, racism, ignorance, all these things, right? And arguably that's part of this whole thing, that's part of the whole strategy. So, okay, so we have these two institutions which are ruling our world and as I will describe, are perpetuating this problem of environmental crisis. So what are some alternatives? And that's the main point of my talk today. So I want to stress that some of the alternatives to these two institutions are egalitarian international social movements and I will go through a lot of examples. But I just want to frame it basically here with regards to principles, okay? So I just want to briefly introduce the idea of liberative social ethics, okay? This is a framework where basically the idea is that we have to struggle for continuous social transformation or social change. But this approach believes, number one, in human equality that we're all equal and we all have equal rights and number two, that we are all free, that we should be free or we should be allowed to be free, okay? So that's one approach. However, we have a different approach which is arguably, I would say, the approach that those in power are perpetuating now, which is to say authoritarian ethics which presupposes the denial of human freedom, the imposition of a relationship where there's like a boss and a worker or someone on top and someone on bottom, something like that. And also you can't see it here, but truth under this paradigm is basically determined by power. Who is it that has power? That's the way that you see truth coming out. And if you look at the Soviet Union in history, there were a lot of lies, of course, that were happening also, of course, here in the United States with Donald Trump and all these things. So there are many, many examples of this dynamic playing out. Okay, so here's some photos. Does anyone recognize this flag here, the green with the red? Syria, right? Anything, but is that the government flag of Syria? No, right? Exactly. That's the Free Syria flag. And the picture that you see in the lower left corner is in Gaza, in occupied Palestine, in the Gaza Strip where for the last year, every Friday, they've been going out to protest against the Israeli occupation, against their basic situation, their condition. And so several hundreds of Palestinians have died, have been shot by the Israeli military, protesting for their rights on the border. And here you see these women actually also carrying a Free Syria flag. So while they are fighting for their own rights to Free Palestine, they are also supporting their brothers and sisters across the border in Syria. And then the other picture that we see here is actually a protest very recently from Sudan. I don't know which city it's from, but you can see similarly that the Free Syria flag is very inspirational for these people coming out to the streets who did realize their dream of getting rid of Omar Bashir. And the example of the Syrian revolution is really very inspirational around the region and hopefully maybe even here. And here's another example, a picture from New York. Free Palestinian, Palestine solidarity, you know, there's a lot going on with that as well. Okay, here's a picture of some people who were involved with Nomas Muertes that I did, as I mentioned earlier. So Nomas Muertes is a group that I also worked with for a little bit in 2012. And what they do is that they are on the border of Arizona with Mexico, and they basically provide humanitarian aid with regards to food. We do, well, we. Nomas Muertes does border, water drops throughout different trails where migrants typically go and so on. So it's definitely a great example of what I'm trying to propose here in terms of like grassroots people power approaches to this problem. However, you do see that recently Nomas Muertes has been cracked down on by the Trump administration. They're now facing multiple felony counts for simply engaging in solidarity work, humanitarian support for these oppressed migrants. So there's also that problem, right? Which is that when we have movements and groups that are supporting vulnerable people or groups like migrants whose existence threatens the whole existence of the state, then we see that the state cracks down on this. And I have many other examples that I'll get to. Okay, so solidarity. This is a principle, right? This is a principle of international social movements. So solidarity basically I would say is another way of expressing human compassion. Human compassion and also human egalitarianism. That is to say we're all in this together and we should support each other, right? And so solidarity does not distinguish between anyone who's in this country as opposed to any other country, right? Because we're all the same in the sense that we're all humans, right? So that's what internationalism means, that we don't discriminate against people simply because they're from a different country. Rather, we should incorporate their interests into our own struggles. And so solidarity shows how arbitrary borders are and how arbitrary states are. Okay, so coming now. So that was my theoretical introduction. So now let's talk about the environmental crisis. So what about nature? Here you see a famous photo of the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. And so this is a photo from the Cancun Conference of Parties. The Conference of Parties is a yearly conference that where all the major, well, in theory all of the countries of the world come together to try to hash out a treaty in order to deal with climate change. And so they've been doing this for many, many years. I would say over 20 years at this point. And so there's been a lot of discourse, a lot of talk about how nature has rights, how the environment, we should support the environment, we should protect it and so on. But this cartoon is kind of, you know, criticizing the concept. Like what rights does nature have when it's being subjected to all of these destructive things like pollution, you know, city, just wild urbanization and all of these things. I think you can also see the fishnets below the pig too. Okay. So then the question comes, the question is raised, does nature have rights, right? Because, you know, humans have rights in theory. Humans, that's the idea of human rights. That's the idea of egalitarian solidarity across borders. So human rights very much underpins that approach. So similarly in parallel can we say that nature has rights? And it's interesting because the Ecuadorian and Bolivian governments in South America in the last decade or so have actually formally recognized that nature has rights. So in the Bolivian constitution it's been integrated and also the Ecuadorian government has passed laws recognizing the same. But is this real or is this just kind of fake? Is this like a PR campaign? If you look at Ecuador, in fact, there was a very interesting proposal that the previous government led by President Correa had proposed. That is to say that there was a very large oil deposit found in the Yasuni Biosphere Reserve, which is in the Amazon within Ecuador. So Correa basically proposed to the world, look, we estimate the value of this oil to be X number of billion dollars. I don't remember what it was. And so what he was saying is, look, we want to protect the environment. We don't want to destroy it. So pay us and we won't. So that was his proposal, which completely failed, of course. No one wanted to finance that program. But it is one approach. That's one approach in terms of international cooperation for trying to deal with this problem. Of course, given that no one paid out, it's currently being completely exploited. And there's been a lot of indigenous peoples resistance and protests against this. But nonetheless, my point here is simply to say that Ecuador, formally recognizing the nature has rights, and then goes on to do this pretty ecocidal, environmentally destructive action. Of course, that's not to say that we should focus on Ecuador and Bolivia. No, I'm coming to that. Because of course, if we look at historically, since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, the beginning of capitalism, we see very clearly that the United States is by far the most responsible for carbon emissions. For greenhouse gas emissions, which are the emissions that are causing our climate and our atmosphere to warm. So right now, although, and I want to show you the, here we go. So this is a nice chart. This just shows the historical responsibility of all carbon emissions. So you can see that the United States is way higher than anyone else at 28%. The next highest is China at 9% of total historical emissions. So even though China right now is actually beating the United States in the sense that it's the number one emitter, clearly the case is that the United States has the most responsibility overall. The other thing that we have to think about is that in China, there's a huge amount of pollution, specifically because China is where so much of the production of the global capitalist economy happens. All of the electronics, so many goods and services that are produced there. And the problem is that basically, while we, or the rest of the world enjoys those goods, the problem is that the environmental consequences of those stay in China, right? Okay, so definitely the United States is a huge problem in this sense. In terms of the government, you know, from George H.W. Bush to the current President Donald Trump, all governments have refused to recognize that this is a serious problem, much less do anything about it, right? And so a couple of years ago now, Trump withdrew the United States from the Paris Accord or the Paris Agreement. And that was an agreement that was hashed out a few years back at the Paris Conference of Parties. And there was a lot of fanfare in the global media. Everyone was very, like, optimistic and hopeful that we were actually going to deal with this problem because it seemed that the governments of the world were coming together to do it. Then, of course, Donald Trump simply smashed it by basically just withdrawing unilaterally. And here's just a picture of his speech. Yeah, it's very sad. Okay, I just want to... I know we're dealing with a lot of difficult subjects here, so I just want to pan out for a moment, just consider what we're dealing with here. So I just want to share a few pictures of places that I've visited in my life, some of the more beautiful places. So this is a beach in Oaxaca. I'm assumed to be in Marijita. This is near Cozumel in Playa del Carmen. This is in Chiapas, some nice lakes. Lagos de Montebeo. And this is also very nice. In Chiapas, in the jungle, I went to this Laguna Miramar. It's very beautiful. So I want to show you this clip. I don't know if I have time though, so maybe not. Yeah, let's get that. Okay, so now let's look specifically at the problem of climate vulnerability. This is a map that basically was created by a risk assessment group. And so what they're doing here is they're looking at the projections of climate change over the next century of climate breakdown and its impacts on different societies in the world. And so basically it's color coders. You can see the worst effects are in the deep red and the regions that will be least affected or that will be okay more or less are those that are green. So you see very, very clearly a very, very clear colonial and geographical aspect to this, right? Whereby you see that the United States in particular, Northern Europe, they seem to be okay whereas Central Africa is completely baked. Same thing for South Asia, Southeast Asia, much of Central America and South America. So the problem that we have here in terms of global warming and climate breakdown is really like another expression of colonialism, of imperialism where the societies of the North, European or European-American societies have historically exploited the environment and the biosphere so much and have gained so much from that very exploitation yet they are the ones who will be, or we, they will be the ones who least have the effects from this problem. So basically it's a grave historical injustice. And yes, these are just a few photos illustrating the same. This photo over here on the right is of Sukur Pakistan in 2010. There was extremely unprecedented flooding in Pakistan during that year. Several millions of people were displaced. And arguably this was supercharged, this storm that created these floods was supercharged by climate change just based off of the physics of the equation that is to say when you have an environment or an atmosphere that has more water vapor, then you have more frequent and more intense storms like you have here. And then of course the photo on the upper left is in Mozambique. Very recently they had the Cyclone Ede which of course was very devastating if you saw the photos or the news about that. And similarly you have a family in Northern India I believe on the last photo there just escaping some flooding from a few years back. Okay, so this is actually an illustration from my book. Of course I didn't illustrate it. It was Santi Mazatil who was a Mexican activist and radical. So I found this image in the independent newspaper from England. And this was in 2011 when there was a very, very serious famine going on in the Horn of Africa in Ethiopia, Somalia, Eritrea. And so I asked him to illustrate this for me for one of the chapters because that was what I was trying to get at, right? Which is what I've been discussing in the last few minutes. I'm going to say that climate change is fundamentally historically unjust. Okay, this is a good schematic of a recent scientific paper that came out last fall and I would very highly recommend if you're interested to check it out. And basically what it's talking about here, let me try to explain. So it looks a little bit busy, right? So here we have, okay, so the glacial interglacial system, right? So since we've had human agriculture in the last 12,000 years we've been going through the interglacial cycle, right? So that means that we are within like a stable climate that will allow the glaciers to come back in the future if that's the case. And having the glaciers is very, very important for human agriculture. So what this dynamic, what this chart is showing is that we have basically two options, okay? So we have the option of what they call engaging in earth system stewardship, right? And basically piloting the earth to a safe future called stabilized earth or we have the much worse outcome of human emissions going up and up, the biosphere being degraded, planetary threshold being surpassed and then the feedback loops of climate change leading inevitably to hot house earth. And let me explain. So the climate change is a very serious problem in the sense that it creates its own feedback loops, right? It's kind of like the Sorcerer's Apprentice from Disney in the sense that if you think about the Amazon rainforest, for example, if it's too hot or if it's too dry then the Amazon rainforest dries out and burns, right? And for that reason all the massive carbon that is stored within those trees and the environment would be released into the atmosphere. So that by itself would worsen global warming. You can think similarly of in the Arctic region with the methane deposits that are below the permafrost. They've been stored there for many, many, I don't even know how many millennia, but the idea similarly is if it gets too warm then the methane might be released up into the atmosphere and methane is much worse than carbon dioxide if you compare it one to one in terms of its warming effect. So what then is the connection between capitalism, the state and eco-crisis? And here I want to just show a short clip by George Monbiot who is a British environmental journalist. And let me just pull that up. Do you say people should do it, George, if they do one thing? What we have to do is a big structural political economic stuff. What we're being told to do is change your cotton buds. And all these sort of pathetic micro-consumerist bollocks which just isn't going to get us anywhere. One of the two things you can do as a consumer is do make change, switch to a plant-based diet. That's one big, big change because animal farming has this massive environmental impact. Another one, stop flying. But beyond that, actually everything we have to do is change the system. We have to overthrow this system which is eating the planet with perpetual growth. I mean, since when was GDP a sensible measure of human welfare? And yet everything that governments want to do is to try to boost GDP. Now, people like the OECD or the World Bank are saying, oh, we're not asking for a lot of growth, just 3% a year. That means doubling in 24 years. Yeah, we're bursting through all the environmental boundaries and screwing the planet already. You want to double it? Double all that? Double it again? Keep doubling it? It's madness. We've got to find a better way of measuring human welfare than perpetual growth. We've got to start ramping down all fossil fuel production and leave fossil fuels in the ground. And at the same time, and this is a nice bit of it, it turns out that through massive rewilding, ecological restoration, you can draw down a load of the carbon dioxide we've already produced. Huge amounts, allowing the forest to come back, the marshes to come back, the sea floor to recover from trawling and stuff. They draw down carbon dioxide and can take us a long way towards stopping climate breakdown at the same time as stopping ecological breakdown. There's time, but we can't do it by just pitting around at the margins of the problem. We've got to go straight to the heart of capitalism and overthrow it. That's George Mombio, who has been a principled climate environmental campaigner for many years, decades. So then the demand that we have really is what is called contraction and convergence, which is depicted here in the chart. And what that means is that basically the emissions of the quote-unquote overdeveloped world, that is to say the United States, Europe, and so on, basically we have to massively contract our emissions if we're going to protect the environment, if we're going to be able to prevent this climate breakdown from coming about. And so the trajectories here that you see, this orange one and the blue ones are the ones that have to happen if we're going to keep global warming to a safe or relatively safe limit. The green is basically the pathway that we're on right now, which will inevitably definitely mean destruction. So then let's move to the main point here. So how is it that we can resist all these trends? Okay, first example I want to give is Move from 1978. This was an environmental black power organization based, community based in Philadelphia. And they organized, they had a very interesting approach in the sense that they were about animal welfare, they were vegan, they protested animal testing, they protested the Vietnam War, they protested police brutality, white supremacy, everything that was going on. But in the sense, the interesting thing is the integration of the ecological critique and the ecological perspective. Here you see the police attacking John Africa, who was imprisoned for four decades, very recently got out and this was just at the repression of one of their actions. And this in fact was a very infamous event in 1985 where the police basically, well, they did, they bombed, they literally bombed the house of Move and this caused a huge fire in Philadelphia destroying some 80 homes. And this was in 1985. So that's what the government did to Move. And so I want to talk about my time in Mexico a little bit and I just wanted to provide this map so that you have an idea of what we're talking about. I'm mostly going to be talking about in Oaxaca and Chiapas, which is down here in the southeast, okay, which is where I was working in 2010. And this is just a photo from a mission that we did to basically look at or investigate the impacts of mining, in particular transnational mining, in particular Canadian-owned mines in the region of Oaxaca in southern Mexico. And these are a couple of Zapoteco Indigenous peoples basically showing us what's going on. They were guiding us and showing us how it is that their communities are resisting the extractive mining economy, that again is very much a foreign thing. Like I think it's 80 to 90% of the mines in Latin America are owned by Canadian corporations. And then in Chiapas, this is a march by a group called Las Abejas, who are Indigenous. In Chiapas and Oaxaca, it's pretty much all Indigenous people. Well, not entirely, but very much the majority. And so Las Abejas were a group that in the 1990s sided with the Isialen, and I'll get to them in a moment. The Isialen was the Zapatista Army of National Liberation. And so what the Las Abejas basically, they have a pacifist approach. They're against war. They're against violence. They're against gender violence. They're against the state, all of these things. And so here they have a monthly commemoration of a massacre that took place in 1995 called Actel, in the Actel community. Basically, this was part of the counter-insurgent logic of the state, of the Mexican state, to repress anyone who was trying to support the Zapatistas. And I'll get back into the Zapatistas in a moment. And from the same March, so the militarization in Mexico, in particular in the Chiapas region, where you still have the Zapatista rebellions still going on, there's a very large presence of the military there. And so here they are basically blockading the army base. That's not to say that they shut it down, but it was a symbolic move. And then this is the site of the massacre in 1995. This was at a church. Essentially, what happened is that the state was up on the highway protecting the paramilitaries down below who were killing all these people simply for resisting the plans and the projects that the Mexican government and the U.S. government behind it, together with all the corporations, were promoting. So here's the Ezia Len, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation. And this is a nice mural from one of their communities, which depicts their uprising at the beginning of 1994 on the 1st of January. And so the Ezia Len is a community-based, indigenous organization that tries to have an alternative model of development, which is communal, which is participatory, which involves a lot of women. And basically it's an alternative way of organizing society. Here we have a nice mural where they're basically saying that we're not all here because our prisoners, we still have our prisoners in prison. So very much this movement is about solidarity, communal solidarity, human solidarity. And they go back to a very interesting revolutionary legacy in Mexico. So the picture on the right is Diego de Rivera showing Emiliano Zapata in his beautiful horse. And Zapata, of course, was the revolutionary general from the Mexican Revolution a century ago, who led probably the most radical movement of the Mexican Revolution through his group being mostly campesino, that is peasant and indigenous people, landless, very poor, but rising up to assert their dignity and to take back the land and to create social justice. That was their point. And the one next to him is Ricardo Flores Magón, who was a Mexican anarchist, who also was influential for Zapata himself. But his group, Magón's group, actually worked very hard to bring about the Mexican Revolution, which overthrew the dictator Porfirio Díaz. Okay. And so continuing with this theme of how it is that the state responds to revolutionary movements or insurgent movements or dissident movements. So this is a photo from Mexico City in the district of Tlatelolco. It's the plaza of the three cultures. And this is the site of a very infamous massacre of students in 1968 on October 2nd. So what happened is that this was 10 days before the 1968 Olympics in Mexico. There was a very large demonstration of students, many of them being left-wing, who were supporters of the Cuban Revolution, who were against the military dictatorship going on at that time, led by the pre-party. And so what happened on the 2nd of October is that they were having this meeting in the plaza of Tlatelolco, and the military came and they simply opened fire indiscriminately and approximately 300 students were murdered that night. And so this, similarly to the actel massacre, although of course many more people died in this one than in actel, every year in Mexico it's very, very famous for the youth, the revolutionary students to come out into the streets everywhere throughout the country and to commemorate this massacre and to call for justice and so on. So this is just a few photos that I want to share with you from the marches in San Cristóbal de las Casas when I was working there. That's one of the main cities in Chiapas. And you can see here the students, they're leaving the university, that's the Unach, the Chiapas University social sciences. They basically just went out to the streets, took it over, expressing their rage. And even though this was 50 years ago, it's very much present within the Mexican consciousness, the cultural consciousness, the political consciousness, simply more pictures of the same. And this is probably the largest, the best picture of that. Okay. And so continuing with that, connecting it specifically to the environmental movement, I want to just show you a brief, sorry, a brief interview with someone from a group called Anticap. Okay. And he will explain about it tonight. My name is Christian Guerrero. I'm with Maria Cris... Sorry. Let me just contextualize this. Okay. So this was in Cancun at the 2010 conference of parties that is where the United Nations come together to try to hash out a treaty to deal with the problem of environmentalism, excuse me, of environmental climate change. And so I was involved with this too. It was a protest movement against the Cancun cop of a bunch of autonomous social movements, youth, feminist organizations. And this is specifically one of the spokespeople for Anticap, which was like a play on words of cop, right? Like cop, conference of parties, police, and also capitalism, right? So against all those things, right? Okay. Here we go. Presidente of Mexico, I'm Ecuadorian-American. We're here in Cancun for the COP16, and we're here in the Vía Capazena camp, part of the international anti-cop space. And we're preparing for a march against green capitalism, mega-projects, and false-solutions. We're marching to the Profepa, which is the EPA, let's say, of Mexico. Mujeres contra la guerra. Mujeres contra el capital. Mujeres contra el matrimonio. We're calling for the World Bank to be out of the climate change process. We're asking for the Mexican government to review large mega-projects that are happening in the country, and generally asking civil society to get engaged in this issue and revealing false-solutions, climate change, techno-fixes, or different mechanisms that are used within the COP that are basically the wrong direction in solving the climate process. Okay. So that was the COP anti-cap. And so similarly, in 2014, this initiative continued with Caravana Climática. So the bus that you can see here was the same bus. It was kind of like the flagship of this group. And so what they did is in 2014, they started a continent-wide tour. They were in northern Mexico in Sonora. And they went down through 16 countries, and they ended up in Peru at Lima at the COP that happened there a few years back in 2014 at the end of 2014. And so what they did is they were going through all of these communities, all of these countries, seeing what impacts, environmentally speaking, were happening and how it is that the people, the indigenous people, the campesino peasant people, the workers, how they were dealing with this and what kind of solutions or what kind of proposals they had for dealing with any of this. To learn more about that, I would definitely encourage you to look them up because they have a very good and systematic, very full report of their findings. Now, in New York City in 2014, there was the first ever People's Climate March, which I also participated in. This was a huge march that took over most of the city. It was really exciting in the sense that a lot of people came out expressing their support for these changes and things like that. But there was a kind of a distinction between that and Flood Wall Street, which happened the very next day. People's Climate March was over a weekend and then this was happening on Monday, the next Monday, Flood Wall Street. So this idea of Flood Wall Street was kind of following from Occupy Wall Street, but specifically rather than just like marching around the city with People's Climate March, Flood Wall Street was more about specifically occupying Wall Street and trying to prevent their operations from happening. And so that's what we tried to do. That's what we blockaded Wall Street, like the building, but we never got inside to disrupt the trade. So in that sense, it was not super effective, but the example or the model is still there. And then, of course, you have the No DApple Movement or the No Dakota Access Pipeline Movement, right? And this was a very big thing recently with Standing Rock with the indigenous resistance against this pipeline and the repression that was meted out against these indigenous peoples and their supporters, which arguably, and I would say, is very much a continuation of the genocide that has established this country, right? The settler-colonial genocide of the indigenous peoples continues very much to this day, and we see this in the Outcome of Standing Rock. And if you've been following the news on this, in fact, there have been some oil spills from this very same pipeline in the Lakota lands in question. Okay, David Buckle is kind of an interesting guy. He was a lawyer in Brooklyn. He was very involved with the LGBTQIA movement, and he was a... Boys Don't Cry was based on the case that he took. But actually, a year ago, actually, just over a year ago, he committed suicide ritualistically. He emulated himself in Prospect Park in Brooklyn as a protest of climate change. Kind of channeling what many of the Buddhist monks did in Tibet and also in Vietnam to protest those wars and occupations. And the ironic thing is that, actually, you know, it's unclear to this point what is the legacy of his action. Like, was it... Will it have affected anything? Because, of course, as Sean was discussing, the Arab Spring, so-called, was begun by Mohammed Bouazizi setting himself on fire in Tunisia. That's how all of it began. So David Buckle maybe had a similar idea. Did he, you know, did he provoke a similar movement? He did, because a year after his death, in fact, just a few days ago, a few weeks ago, was the beginning of what is called Extinction Rebellion, which has been going out throughout much of the world, especially in London, but also in the United States. And so this movement is very much a youth-led movement. As you can see here, these are some youth at Heathrow Airport in London with the banner, Are We the Last Generation? And the idea is that we have to take direct action. We have to blockade. This is Waterloo Bridge in London. The idea is that we have to blockade the system, interrupt the way that it's working, so as to be able to, you know, protect our own lives and that of the future of humanity and nature, right? This is in some museum where they're kind of staging a mass die-in, and then this is, you know, similarly, when you go out to a protest and you have fear of arrest, then you definitely want to have all these numbers on your arms. And this movement shows the social solidarity and the collective support that we need for this. Okay, so I'm coming close to the conclusion now. And I just want to share with you this critique that was made recently of Extinction Rebellion, which was made by this group calling itself the Green Anti-Capitalist Front. And they have, like, six or seven principles about analyzing climate change, climate breakdown. So these are the principles, right? Climate breakdown is an existential threat, right? It threatens our very existence, okay? Number two, the crisis is due to capitalism, that is to say, the growth economy based on profit, based on exploitation, based on class hierarchy. We need international class solidarity in order to, you know, build a movement to deal with this problem, right? As I was saying before, in terms of, you know, not discriminating, not distinguishing among people who are living within different countries, because we're all in this together, building collective power, that is to say, through movements, through institutions, through unions, things like that, and having a diversity of tactics, right? So that is to say, some people might want to, you know, write letters to Congress, others might want to, you know, block up, go to direct action protests, others might want to, you know, do like educational talks. There are a lot of different ways that we can do this. It doesn't have to be just one, right? And then horizontal bottom-up structures, that's kind of similar to the point about collective power. And the most important thing, I think, is we need a new system, right? We need a new system, a new economy, a new way of relating with each other, and a new way of doing politics. And so this is just a nice graphic kind of summarizing their point, right? Which is that we can get, we can achieve environmental sustainability by having economic democracy. Of course, economic democracy is not something that we have right now, but it's something that we have to strive for in our society. So almost very much at the end here. So I just want to share some interesting or some perspectives that I think are key to this problem, to analyzing this problem, and I think I'm repeating myself here, but the problem really is that we have a class society, right? So we have all these people within our society that have to be working all of their lives, right? From nine to five, eight to six, whatever, for, you know, 30 or 40 years. But this is not the point of life, of course, right? So we have to be able to create alternatives and try to overcome this class division, overcome these oppressions and hierarchies so that we can all go together, so that we can collectively deal with this problem. And specifically I want to say that there's a proposal for green unionism, which is kind of what I was just talking about with economic democracy and ecological sustainability. And this is very much related to the point of just transition, which is extremely important. So, excuse me, one of the major reasons that a lot of people are kind of hesitant about, you know, dealing with climate change or even recognizing that it's going on, is that it threatens the economy as it exists, right? And specifically for a lot, we're not talking about the bosses or the rich right now, we're talking about the workers, like coal workers or workers who are in the oil industry or workers who are in the extractive environment. The point is not to demonize those workers, of course not, because they don't have any choice in the matter. Because we have a hierarchical class society, if you want to survive, if you want your family to survive, oftentimes you don't have choices. You have to just do what you have, take the options that are given to you. But the point of the just transition is to prioritize the interests and the concerns of those workers who would be affected if we were to create a renewable economy, a post-carbon economy. The idea would be to have programs in place so that those workers would not be negatively affected, so that we can get them on our side, in fact, and try to overcome the opposition that they would be presenting to this problem of climate change, of dealing with it. And beyond that, I want to specifically suggest that I think even though these don't specifically have to do with environment, they are very important for the overall struggle, and that is tenants unions and students unions, right? Because throughout the entire world, we need to find these alternative institutions where we can build our own power and assert our own power against what is already existing. And I think that tenants unions and students unions are a good way of doing that. And the overall idea is dual power, dual power referring to a second power against the government and capitalism, against the rich and against the state. So the dual power would be the community, the people resisting against these institutions that are destroying our environment and our society. Okay, so second and last, how to save the planet, okay? In conclusion, okay. So, four things, number one, ecological restoration, that is to say many of the lands of the United States, for example, have been deforested, a lot of the old growth forests have been destroyed, and we need to replant them, we need to bring them back because they need to be present in order to help us to draw down the carbon, to access carbon that's in the atmosphere. And this is similar to the idea of natural geoengineering, which is if you've looked at some of the proposed solutions to climate change, some of what they say is like we need to put particles, sulfate particles in the upper atmosphere, or mirrors in the upper atmosphere to bounce the solar radiation back to the sun or something like that. But natural geoengineering is nothing about that, not using weird technologies or anything, but rather focusing on the fact that we need to sequester the carbon and that the good way of doing that is to recreate, re-wild the world through having a lot more greenery and so on. And beyond that, of course, we have the self-managed decline of the fossil fuel economy, so we need to get rid of the fossil fuel economy if we're going to save off this serious problem. And in order to do that, I think the best way of doing it would be through popular organization, self-organization, through workers, through communities and so on, so that's why I propose green or community syndicalism, and syndicalism here just means unionism, right? Just the idea that we need to have popular organs of power to express our desires and our goals, right? We can't just be depending on the politicians, because very often they're not interested in what we're interested in, and they're not, you know, we're not working together in that sense. Okay, so just the last thing here, you know, so there are different levels at which we can deal with this problem, right? There's the micro or the individual level, the meso, which is like in the middle, we can say is like the community or the local region, and then the macro, which is like the country, the continent and the world. Okay, so that's all I have for you. Thank you.