“..Ten years after the Seattle protests, climate activists are poised to make the U.N. climate change summit their “growing up party.”
The book is a fascinating account of what really happened in Seattle, but when I spoke to David Solnit, the direct-action guru who helped engineer the shutdown, I found him less interested in reminiscing about 1999 ..
.. than in talking about the upcoming United Nations climate change summit in Copenhagen ..
.. and the “climate justice” actions he is helping to organize across the United States on November 30.
“This is definitely a Seattle-type moment,” Solnit told me.
“People are ready to throw down.”
There is certainly a Seattle quality to the Copenhagen mobilization: ..
.. the huge range of groups that will be there; ..
.. the diverse tactics that will be on display;..
.. and the developing-country governments ready to bring activist demands into the summit.
But Copenhagen is not merely a Seattle do-over.
It feels, instead, as though the progressive tectonic plates are shifting ..
.. creating a movement that builds on the strengths of an earlier era .. but also learns from its mistakes.
The big criticism of the movement the media insisted on calling “antiglobalization” was always that it had a laundry list of grievances and few concrete alternatives.
The movement converging on Copenhagen, in contrast, is about a single issue–climate change–
– but it weaves a coherent narrative about its cause, and its cures, that incorporates virtually every issue on the planet.
In this narrative, our climate is changing not simply because of particular polluting practices but because of the underlying logic of capitalism ..
.. which values short-term profit and perpetual growth above all else.
Our governments would have us believe that the same logic can now be harnessed to solve the climate crisis–
– by creating a tradable commodity called “carbon” ..
.. and by transforming forests and farmland into “sinks” ..
.. that will supposedly offset our runaway emissions…”
go to source/story>>Copenhagen: An Anti-Globalization Movement Comes of Age | | AlterNet
