REDD is not Green! or why you should boycott Christmas trees

“Stop talking, start planting” is a rallying call to people around the planet to take time to plant trees in their communities this month, with the painful observation that had UN delegates planted trees last year during the Copenhagen delegations, it would have done more to save the planet than their non-binding compromise accord.

The simplicity is compelling, but the question of rescuing our planet’s lungs is complicated. REDD, the UN program “Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries,” is among the most controversial points of discord between the delegates and forest ecologists, activists and indigenous people around the world.
(Read a detailed analysis complete with case studies here.) When 30,000 people gathered in Cochabamba last year for the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth, we rejected capitalizing the world’s forests as a false solution for the planet’s forests. By enabling governments to sell the “protection” of their nation’s forests as carbon credits for international private industry, REDD ignores the rights and ecology of indigenous people inhabiting the forests. In addition, it makes little distinction between reforested land and original forest ecosystems, something any forest dweller could tell you is fundamental.

Forests are wonderfully complex ecosystems that rely upon biodiversity and decomposition to regenerate trees and the animal species that live within them.

All week with the Via Campesina and Espacio Mexicano we heard communities passionately reject REDD, emphasizing that it is indigenous people who have valued and protected forests for centuries against the invasive and destructive policies of governments and private industry. Perhaps even more fundamentally, forests are part of Mother Earth and shouldn’t be subjected to the commodification of natural resources that has led us to the climate crisis we are living now.

After a rousing workshop at Espacio Mexicano on the dangers of REDD, I biked the 15 kilometers outside the city center to the Pro-REDD event at the Marriot Hotel located in Cancun’s hotel zone for one of the few UN events that took place outside of the exclusive, isolated and militarized Moon Palace. When the US representative shared what relief he felt to have escaped outside the gates of the Moon Palace for a few hours, I marveled at the symbolism. The rapid growth of the tourist industry in Cancun has transformed what was once mangrove forests into sculpted golf courses, tacky spring-break dance clubs and luxury hotels. Within the armored gates, UN representatives and observers heard very little in opposition to REDD, since people were ejected from the premises for wearing anti-REDD stickers or raising their voice. At this Pro-REDD exposition at the Marriot there was not a single indigenous person present.

Instead, Sam Walton, the CEO of Walmart; Robert Zoellick, president of the World Bank, and an frightening cross-section of elite forces presented polished presentations as to how REDD was the only way to save our forests. Featured speakers included the Governor of Chiapas and California’s EPA Secretary who flaunted their newly signed pact that will exchange Chiapas’s jungles with Pacific Gas & Electric Company’s right to continue contaminating California. The environmental justice struggle against the toxic emissions from PG&E that has devastated San Francisco’s predominantly African American and low-income communities with cancer, asthma, heart disease and more was made world famous with the movie Erin Brockovich. Meanwhile Chiapas is recognized around the world as an iconoclast for indigenous resistance, as its Mayan inhabitants have suffered under Mexican military occupation and “low-intensity” warfare in patterns that directly reflect corporate investments in extracting Chiapas’ natural resources of oil, uranium and yes, forests. This new mechanism bodes ominously to strengthen this repression.

Besides the Governor of Chiapas, the only other brown person on the panel was the president of Guyana, who has already set into motion REDD programming at the behest of Norway, who deposited the relevant millions into the hands of the World Bank, the elite’s chosen mechanism for the transfer of climate change funding. The World Bank has held onto the money for over a year and left Guyana to fund its own protection programs, jeopardizing the people’s trust of their own government and the program. That the World Bank failed to deliver on promises comes as little surprise to the millions of people in developing nations across the world who have plummeted into even deeper poverty as a result of World Bank policies that sacrifice local sustainability for international corporate interests notorious for propagating poverty and exploitation, all in the name of alleviating poverty.

A friend of mine challenged my knee-jerk rejection of “going green” propaganda from entities such as Walmart or the World Bank, “We are all on this planet together, and everyone has to take steps forward from where they are if we are to truly save us from ourselves. We don’t have time to be judgmental.” While the concept is compelling, without offering a self-analysis that includes genuine recognition and repentance of flawed framework and actions in the past, companies and governments give us no reason to believe that this time things will be different.

So what can we do? The Cancun Accord approved REDD even while refusing to set the framework for mandatory emissions reduction under the KYOTO protocol. The world’s elite have strong-armed the leaders of poor nations into sacrificing their best interests in exchange for crumbs off the master’s table. The UN conference is over. It would be easy to lose hope.

Let us instead follow the example of the children who planted 193 trees outside the UN conference, and are organizing young people across the world to plant one million trees in each country. It’s Christmas time. This year, instead of celebrating by chopping a tree down and supporting chemically-heavy tree farming practices, why not plant one instead?