Local Solutions: Challenge Corporate Power, Embrace True Democracy

Vandana Shiva, writing in Alternet, has another insightful piece on the danger of so-called solutions to the problems of globalization: pollution, monopoly, disenfranchisement.

So here you have globalization adding to emissions and it needs to be a continued part of our work. And you've got false solutions that were laid out by Jerry [Mander]. But the false solution that I think we need to pay particular attention to is the dominant solution in terms of carbon trading. Because at the philosophical level, at the world-view level, it's the second privatization of the atmospheric commons. The first privatization was putting the pollution into the atmosphere beyond the earth's recycling capacity. Now with carbon trading, the rights to the earth's carbon cycling capacity are gravitating exactly into the arms of the polluters. The environmental principal used to be the polluter must pay. Carbon trading is transforming that into the polluter gets paid.

She rightfully zeros in on carbon-trading and corporate-controlled governments as the enemies of our future generations in the battle for survival of life as we know it on our planet.

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