This Changes Everything

by Naomi Klein

  That was certainly the message when the three-person Joint Review Panel that had been so scared by the Heiltsuk community’s welcome in Bella Bella finally handed down its recommendation to Canada’s federal government. The Northern Gateway pipeline should go ahead, the panel announced. And though it enumerated 209 conditions that should be met before construction—from submiting caribou habitat protection plans to producing an updated inventory of waterway crossings “in both Adobe PDF and Microsoft Excel spreadsheet formats”—the ruling was almost universally interpreted as a political green light.54

  Only two out of the over one thousand people who spoke at the panel’s community hearings in British Columbia supported the project. One poll showed that 80 percent of the province’s residents opposed having more oil tankers along their marine-rich coastline. That a supposedly impartial review body could rule in favor of the pipeline in the face of this kind of overwhelming opposition was seen by many in Canada as clear evidence of a serious underlying crisis, one far more about money and power than the environment. “Sadly, today’s results are exactly what we expected,” said anti-pipeline campaigner Torrance Coste, “proof that our democratic system is broken.”55

  In a sense, these are merely local manifestations of the global democratic crisis represented by climate change itself. As Venezuelan political scientist Edgardo Lander aptly puts it, “The total failure of climate negotiation serves to highlight the extent to which we now live in a post-democratic society. The interests of financial capital and the oil industry are much more important than the democratic will of people around the world. In the global neoliberal society profit is more important than life.” Or, as George Monbiot, The Guardian’s indispensable environmental columnist, put it on the twenty-year anniversary of the Rio Earth Summit, “Was it too much to have asked of the world’s governments, which performed such miracles in developing stealth bombers and drone warfare, global markets and trillion-dollar bailouts, that they might spend a tenth of the energy and resources they devoted to these projects on defending our living planet? It seems, sadly, that it was.” Indeed, the failure of our political leaders to even attempt to ensure a safe future for us represents a crisis of legitimacy of almost unfathomable proportions.56

  And yet a great many people have reacted to this crisis not by abandoning the promise of genuine self-government, but rather by attempting to make good on that promise in the spheres where they still have real influence. It’s striking, for instance, that even as national governments and international agencies fail us, cities are leading the way on climate action around the world, from Bogotá to Vancouver. Smaller communities are also taking the lead in the democratic preparation for a climate-changed future. This can be seen most clearly in the fast-growing Transition Town movement. Started in 2006 in Totnes—an ancient market town in Devon, England, with a bohemian reputation—the movement has since spread to more than 460 locations in at least forty-three countries worldwide. Each Transition Town (and this may be an actual town or a neighborhood in a larger city) undertakes to design what the movement calls an “energy descent action plan”—a collectively drafted blueprint for lowering its emissions and weaning itself off fossil fuels. The process opens up rare spaces for participatory democracy, with neighbors packing consultation meetings at city halls to share ideas about everything from how to increase their food security through increased local agriculture to building more efficient affordable housing.57

  Nor is it all dry planning meetings. In Totnes, the local Transition group organizes frequent movie nights, public lectures, and discussions, as well as street festivals to celebrate each landmark toward greater sustainability. This too is part of responding to the climate crisis, as critical as having secure food supplies and building sturdy seawalls. Because a key determinant in how any community survives an extreme weather event is its connective tissue—the presence of small local businesses and common spaces where neighbors can get to know one another and make sure that elderly people aren’t forgotten during crushing heat waves or storms. As the environmental writer and analyst David Roberts has observed, “the ingredients of resilience” are “overlapping social and civic circles, filled with people who, by virtue of living in close proximity and sharing common spaces, know and take care of each other. The greatest danger in times of stress or threat is isolation. Finding ways of expanding public spaces and nurturing civic involvement is not just some woolly-headed liberal project—it’s a survival strategy.”58

  The intimacy of local politics is also what has turned this tier of government into an important site of resistance to the carbon extraction frenzy—whether it’s cities voting to take back control over a coal-burning utility that won’t switch to renewables (as so many citizens are doing in Germany), or municipalities adopting policies to divest city holdings of fossil fuels, or towns passing anti-fracking ordinances. And these are not mere symbolic expressions of dissent. Commenting on the stakes of his client’s court challenge to local anti-fracking ordinances, Thomas West, a lawyer for Norse Energy Corporation USA, told The New York Times, “It’s going to decide the future of the oil and gas industry in the state of New York.”59

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  Local ordinances are not the only—or even the most powerful—unconventional legal tools that may help Blockadia to extend its early victories. This became apparent when the panel reviewing Enbridge’s Northern Gateway pipeline announced its recommendations. The news that it had greenlighted the federal government to approve the much loathed tar sands project was not, for the most part, greeted with despair. Instead, a great many Canadians remained convinced that the pipeline would never go ahead and that the British Columbia coast would be saved—no matter what the panel said or what the federal government did.

  “The federal cabinet needs First Nations’ approval and social license from British Columbians, and they have neither,” said Sierra Club BC campaigns director Caitlyn Vernon. And referring to the Save the Fraser Declaration signed by Chief Baptiste and so many others, she added, “First Nations have formally banned pipelines and tankers from their territories on the basis of Indigenous law.”60 It was a sentiment echoed repeatedly in news reports: that the legal title of the province’s First Nations was so powerful that even if the federal government did approve the pipeline (which it eventually did in June 2014), the project would be successfully stopped in the courts through Indigenous legal challenges, as well as in the forests through direct action.

  Is it true? As the next chapter will explore, the historical claims being made by Indigenous peoples around the world as well as by developing countries for an honoring of historical debts indeed have the potential to act as counterweights to increasingly undemocratic and intransigent governments. But the outcome of this power struggle is by no means certain. As always, it depends on what kind of movement rallies behind these human rights and moral claims.

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  I. When a make-up hearing was scheduled by the Joint Review Panel months later, it was held in a predominantly white community elsewhere in the province.

  II. Sadly, this pristine UNESCO Biosphere Reserve is once again at risk after an international court ruling declared the waters surrounding the Caribbean islands to be legally owned by the government of Nicaragua (though the islands themselves remain part of Colombia). And Nicaragua has stated its intention to drill.

  III. For instance, in May 2013, sixty-eight groups and individuals—including Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace, and Robert Kennedy Jr.—signed a letter that directly criticized the EDF and and its president Fred Krupp for their role in creating the industry-partnered Center for Sustainable Shale Development (CSSD). “CSSD bills itself as a collaborative effort between ‘diverse interests with a common goal,’ but our goals as a nation are not, and cannot, be the same as those of Chevron, Consol Energy, EQT Corporation, and Shell, all partners in CSSD,” the letter states. “These corporations are interested in extracting as much shale gas and oil as possible, and at
a low cost. We are interested in minimizing the extraction and consumption of fossil fuels and in facilitating a rapid transition to the real sustainable energy sources—the sun, the wind, and hydropower.”

  IV. Reached by email, Carl Pope, who had not previously commented on the controversy, explained his actions as follows: “Climate advocates were at war with the coal industry, and at that moment Chesapeake was willing to ally with us. I understand the concerns of those who thought that alliance was a bad idea—but it is likely that without it about 75 of the pending 150 new coal fired power plants we stopped would have been built instead.” He added, “What I do regret is the failure at the time to understand the scale and form that the shale gas and oil revolution would take, which led us to make inadequate investments in getting ready for the assault that would soon be coming at states like Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Colorado. That was a significant, and costly, failure of vision.”

  V. This reached truly absurd levels in December 2013 when two twentysomething antifracking activists were charged with staging a “terrorism hoax” after they unfurled cloth protest banners at the headquarters of Devon Energy in Oklahoma City. Playing on the Hunger Games slogan, one of the banners said: “THE ODDS ARE NEVER IN OUR FAVOR.” Standard, even benign activist fare—except for one detail. According to Oklahoma City Police captain Dexter Nelson, as the banner was lowered it shed a “black powder substance” that was meant to mimic a “biochemical assault,” as the police report put it. That nefarious powder, the captain stated, was “later determined to be glitter.” Never mind that the video of the event showed absolutely no concern about the falling glitter from the assembled onlookers. “I could have swept it up in two minutes if they gave me a broom,” said Stefan Warner, one of those charged and facing the prospect of up to ten years in jail.

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  YOU AND WHAT ARMY?

  Indigenous Rights and the Power of Keeping Our Word

  “I never thought I would ever see the day that we would come together. Relationships are changing, stereotypes are disappearing, there’s more respect for one another. If anything, this Enbridge Northern Gateway has unified British Columbia.”

  —Geraldine Thomas-Flurer, coordinator of the Yinka Dene Alliance, a First Nations coalition opposing the Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline, 20131

  “There is never peace in West Virginia because there is never justice.”

  —Labor organizer Mary Harris “Mother” Jones, 19252

  The guy from Standard & Poor’s was leafing through the fat binder on the round table in the meeting room, brow furrowed, skimming and nodding.

  It was 2004 and I found myself sitting in on a private meeting between two important First Nations leaders and a representative of one of the three most powerful credit rating agencies in the world. The meeting had been requested by Arthur Manuel, a former Neskonlith chief in the interior of British Columbia, now spokesperson for the Indigenous Network on Economies and Trade.

  Arthur Manuel, who comes from a long line of respected Native leaders, is an internationally recognized thinker on the question of how to force belligerent governments to respect Indigenous land rights, though you might not guess it from his plainspoken manner or his tendency to chuckle mid-sentence. His theory is that nothing will change until there is a credible threat that continuing to violate Native rights will carry serious financial costs, whether for governments or investors. So he has been looking for different ways to inflict those costs.

  That’s why he had initiated a correspondence with Standard & Poor’s, which routinely blesses Canada with a AAA credit rating, a much coveted indicator to investors that the country is a safe and secure place in which to sink their money. In letters to the agency, Manuel had argued that Canada did not deserve such a high rating because it was failing to report a very important liability: a massive unpaid debt that takes the form of all the wealth that had been extracted from unceded Indigenous land, without consent—since 1846.3 He further explained the various Supreme Court cases that had affirmed that Aboriginal and Treaty Rights were still very much alive.

  After much back-and-forth, Manuel had managed to get a meeting with Joydeep Mukherji, director of the Sovereign Ratings Group, and the man responsible for issuing Canada’s credit rating. The meeting took place at S&P’s headquarters, a towering building just off Wall Street. Manuel had invited Guujaaw, the charismatic president of the Haida Nation, to help him make the case about those unpaid debts, and at the last minute had asked me to come along as a witness. Unaware that, post-9/11, official ID is required to get into all major Manhattan office buildings, the Haida leader had left his passport in his hotel room; dressed in a short-sleeved checked shirt and with a long braid down his back, Guujaaw almost didn’t make it past security. But after some negotiation with security (and intervention from Manuel’s contact upstairs), we made it in.

  At the meeting, Manuel presented the Okanagan writ of summons, and explained that similar writs had been filed by many other First Nations. These simple documents, asserting land title to large swaths of territory, put the Canadian government on notice that these bands had every intention of taking legal action to get the economic benefits of lands being used by resource companies without their consent. These writs, Manuel explained, represented trillions of dollars’ worth of unacknowledged liability being carried by the Canadian state.

  Guujaaw then solemnly presented Mukherji with the Haida Nation’s registered statement of claim, a seven-page legal document that had been filed before the Supreme Court of British Columbia seeking damages and reparations from the provincial government for unlawfully exploiting and degrading lands and waters that are rightfully controlled by the Haida. Indeed, at that moment, the case was being argued before the Supreme Court of Canada, challenging both the logging giant Weyerhaeuser and the provincial government of British Columbia over a failure to consult before logging the forests on the Pacific island of Haida Gwaii. “Right now the Canadian and British Columbia governments are using our land and our resources—Aboriginal and Treaty Rights—as collateral for all the loans they get from Wall Street,” Manuel said. “We are in fact subsidizing the wealth of Canada and British Columbia with our impoverishment.”4

  Mukherji and an S&P colleague listened and silently skimmed Manuel’s documents. A polite question was asked about Canada’s recent federal elections and whether the new government was expected to change the enforcement of Indigenous land rights. It was clear that none of this was new to them—not the claims, not the court rulings, not the constitutional language. They did not dispute any of the facts. But Mukherji explained as nicely as he possibly could that the agency had come to the conclusion that Canada’s First Nations did not have the power to enforce their rights and therefore to collect on their enormous debts. Which meant, from S&P’s perspective, that those debts shouldn’t affect Canada’s stellar credit rating. The company would, however, continue to monitor the situation to see if the dynamics changed.

  And with that we were back on the street, surrounded by New Yorkers clutching iced lattes and barking into cell phones. Manuel snapped a few pictures of Guujaaw underneath the Standard & Poor’s sign, flanked by security guards in body armor. The two men seemed undaunted by what had transpired; I, on the other hand, was reeling. Because what the men from S&P were really saying to these two representatives of my country’s original inhabitants was: “We know you never sold your land. But how are you going to make the Canadian government keep its word? You and what army?”

  At the time, there did not seem to be a good answer to that question. Indigenous rights in North America did not have powerful forces marshaled behind them and they had plenty of powerful forces standing in opposition. Not just government, industry, and police, but also corporate-owned media that cast them as living in the past and enjoying undeserved special rights, while those same media outlets usually failed to do basic public education about the nature of the treaties our governments (
or rather their British predecessors) had signed. Even most intelligent, progressive thinkers paid little heed: sure they supported Indigenous rights in theory, but usually as part of the broader multicultural mosaic, not as something they needed to actively defend.

  However, in perhaps the most politically significant development of the rise of Blockadia-style resistance, this dynamic is changing rapidly—and an army of sorts is beginning to coalesce around the fight to turn Indigenous land rights into hard economic realities that neither government nor industry can ignore.

  The Last Line of Defense

  As we have seen, the exercise of Indigenous rights has played a central role in the rise of the current wave of fossil fuel resistance. The Nez Perce were the ones who were ultimately able to stop the big rigs on Highway 12 in Idaho and Montana; the Northern Cheyenne continue to be the biggest barrier to coal development in southeastern Montana; the Lummi present the greatest legal obstacle to the construction of the biggest proposed coal export terminal in the Pacific Northwest; the Elsipogtog First Nation managed to substantially interfere with seismic testing for fracking in New Brunswick; and so on. Going back further, it’s worth remembering that the struggles of the Ogoni and Ijaw in Nigeria included a broad demand for self-determination and resource control over land that both groups claimed was illegitimately taken from them during the colonial formation of Nigeria. In short, Indigenous land and treaty rights have proved a major barrier for the extractive industries in many of the key Blockadia struggles.

  And through these victories, a great many non-Natives are beginning to understand that these rights represent some of the most robust tools available to prevent ecological crisis. Even more critically, many non-Natives are also beginning to see that the ways of life that Indigenous groups are protecting have a great deal to teach about how to relate to the land in ways that are not purely extractive. This represents a true sea change over a very short period of time. My own country offers a glimpse into the speed of this shift.