Category Archives: Climate Justice

Our season of fire

by Jim Hodgson

Summerland – both my hometown and the site of my so-called “retirement” – made national and global headlines over the past 10 days because of that ultra-fast-moving wildfire that ignited just west of town on Friday evening, August 7.

The fire, frightening as it was and devastating as it is for those who lost homes and jobs because of it, brought out the best among neighbours: from the first minutes, people helped each other. Soon, residents of Penticton and other communities welcomed 20,000 evacuees from Summerland, Peachland and the smaller communities like Faulder and Meadow Valley to the west. I am grateful to neighbours, first responders, and the fire-fighters who came from near and far (gracias, México!) to help control the fire. I’ll say a bit more about my situation below.

Over the summer, I had been pondering the concept of development as I have been using it in my Unwrapping Development blog posts – mostly the international sort that attempts (and often fails) to improve livelihoods in less-privileged parts of the world – and the way the word development gets bandied around in local, provincial and Canadian politics.

By way of illustration, I was going to write about a conflict over a proposed gravel pit mine in Garnet Valley, the northwest part of Summerland. In July, the provincial government of British Columbia re-ignited public debate over the gravel pit. Those of us who opposed the proposal thought we had won when a B.C. Supreme Court judge quashed it in February.

But no. It seems provincial mining laws can override opposition from the municipal council, the regional district (like a county in other places), residents, the Okanagan Nation Alliance and the Penticton Indian Band.

Garnet Valley, like nearby Prairie Valley, Cartwright Mountain and the mountains between Garnet Vally and Okanagan Lake, suffered still-not fully known damage in the recent fire. But the human and ecological concerns about the proposed gravel pit remain. Over time, plants and trees will grow again, and wildlife return. Better, however, with no gravel pit!

Our journey

David and I had left Summerland Wednesday, Aug. 5 before the fire for a visit to Ottawa. When the fire erupted, we talked about whether to try to return early or not. We chose to remain in Ottawa until our scheduled return Tuesday, Aug. 10. By then, it was clear to us that we needed to go back.

Getting there, however, turned into our own Odyssey, or as David called it, our own Amazing Race Canada. Our flights were cancelled, re-scheduled, and cancelled again because of heavy smoke at Kelowna airport. We talked the airline into taking us as far as Calgary, thinking that then we could rent a car and drive to Kelowna, retrieve our car there, and then drive on to Penticton to re-connect with family and retrieve our cat. 

“Life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans,” as John Lennon sang, and no sooner than the new flights were confirmed, car rented and motel room booked, the plans fell apart. Avis became my Cyclops, and hotels.com my Poseidon. I eventually won both battles, however, and we were able to buy (expensive) tickets on a late-night flight from Calgary to Kelowna. We got the car back and spent the night in a motel in East Kelowna. 

The next day, we made the long detour to Penticton, arriving there mid-afternoon. We got ourselves sorted out with the good people of B.C. Emergency Support Services, recovered our cat Chia, and settled into a hotel in Oliver.

This of course is a story very different from those of people I know who survived the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, or the more recent earthquakes in Venezuela and Colombia. Mine were, as we sometimes joke, first-world problems. We have enough money to absorb some stupid mistakes; we have insurance; we have governments capable of providing assistance.

When I write about development, it has to included capacity for disaster-response just as it must respect the principle of subsidiarity (prominent in Catholic social teaching): community challenges should be handled by the most local authority possible. A higher authority should only assist, support, or coordinate when a lower group cannot do the job alone.

We have a home to go back to and we’ll work with others to clean up and where necessary, re-build. And, more than ever, we must evoke ecological concerns about development. What we do in the name of development continues to affect the climate. Every summer is becoming a season of dread.

Santa Marta: Transitioning away from fossil fuels

By Jim Hodgson

Good news may be hard to find these days. But here’s some. Representatives from about 60 nations met in northern Colombia in April to promote a transition away from fossil fuels.

The First Conference on Transitioning away from Fossil Fuels was a response to frustration felt after recent United Nations COP climate conferences, especially the one held last November in Belém, Brazil. Potential consensus around the transition away from fossil fuels broke down in the face of lobbying by oil companies and opposition from oil-producing nations.

The conference, co-sponsored by Colombia and Netherlands, ended April 29 with a clear message: the global conversation has shifted from whether to phase out oil, gas and coal to how to do it, with financing emerging as one of the biggest obstacles. As in many such international conferences, there were pre-events that gathered people from Indigenous, religious and other sectors.

By all accounts, the gathering in Santa Marta felt different from past climate talks. 

“The mood here in Santa Marta is euphoric,” said Tzeporah Berman, the founder and chair of the fossil fuel non-proliferation treaty initiative. “After years stuck in endless debates about whether to phase out fossil fuels, finally we are focusing on the how. We are no longer fighting for recognition of the problem, but creating solutions. It’s like watching a dam break – all that pent-up experience, knowledge and passion suddenly flowing into concrete ways to phase out dirty fuels. The hope is contagious.”

But participants were not unrealistic. Colombian President Gustavo Petro warned the world could “reach a point of no return” without the Amazon’s role in regulating the climate. Colombia is itself an oil-producing nation, but it has set a path of “gradual transition at home that balances climate goals with economic realities.”

Finding a good way forward requires addressing the global debt crisis. Countries in the global south that want to invest in renewable energy find themselves blocked by having to spend on high interest payments and imported fuel.

After the conference, Canadian scientist and broadcaster David Suzuki wrote: “Climate action requires unhinging power from foreign corporate privilege and putting it toward justice, democracy and the communities most affected.”

The Canadian government sent a representative: Jeanne-Marie Huddleston, Canada’s chief climate change negotiator – not a minister, but an employee of Environment Canada. Absence of a government minister was criticized (above) by Lloyd Axworthy, a former Canadian foreign minister who has emerged as a frequent critic of Prime Minister Mark Carney’s climate priorities – or lack of them.

In recent weeks, Canada has announced approval for expanding liquefied natural gas, a sovereign wealth fund — which among other things could help oil and gas projects of national interest — and its next budget looks to be cushioned by higher oil prices driven by the Iran war.

Participating states agreed to meet again in Tuvalu in early 2027, a gathering to be co-hosted by Ireland. Climate scientists and the UN have warned that the South Pacific island nation could be submerged by 2100 due to rising sea levels.

"Another World is Possible," World Social Forum, Porto Alegre, Brasil (2005)

The old order is dead. Let’s make a new, more just order.

by Jim Hodgson

It was too much to hope that the well-heeled audience at Davos would boo Donald Trump from the stage a day after they had offered Mark Carney a standing ovation. But by the end of Wednesday, it seemed that the wall of resistance to any U.S. take-over of Greenland was successful, and the president backed down. An important victory.

Still, “la rupture de l’ordre mondial” of which Carney spoke remains. And he’s right: we shouldn’t mourn it. The international financial institutions invented in 1944 at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, gave overwhelming power to the rich countries of the Global North. 

And the United Nations system that followed, with a veto given to each of the five most powerful countries, has protected their interests – even in the face of overwhelming contrarian votes in the UN General Assembly. Think, for example, of the annual vote to end the cruel U.S. blockade of Cuba.

That order was designed by the nations that existed at the end of World War II, especially the colonial or neo-colonial states of Europe and the Americas. Most of the Caribbean, Africa and large parts of south Asia were still under colonial rule. That order imposed and perpetuated a Global North-based order on all the new nations that were born in the 25 years or so after the war: the majority of nations that exist today.

And that order, at least in the eyes of three of the five veto-holders, effectively imposed capitalism as a synonym for democracy. The United States and its allies were satisfied with a sort of formal democracy, a certain alternance between parties of the right and centre-right, and if that failed, then a military government was a useful interlude until the real order could be re-established and markets were safe. 

Canada would “go along to get along,” as Carney admitted. 

Just as it did less than three weeks ago when the United States bombed Venezuela and kidnapped its president. And just as it has for more than two years over Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

In his speech, Carney seemed to offer a vision of capitalism without the now-erratic United States. It’s still reliant on resource extraction, military spending, and massive capital investment.

But if we are all to grow and thrive, we must demand more. We require an end to practices that exploit social inequities and our shared ecology. 

Alternatives

Because of the paths on which my life has taken me, one that is especially close to my heart is the call from the Indigenous people of Zapatista communities in southern Mexico for “a world with room for all” – “un mundo donde quepan muchos mundos.” But other visions come from other places, including three decades of gatherings of the World Social Forum.

More than 50 years ago, the majority world united behind a vision of economic decolonization, sovereign development, and international cooperation across areas such as debt, trade, finance, and technology. That vision became known as the New International Economic Order (NIEO) and was adopted by the UN General Assembly. But, power relations being what they are, it was never implemented. (Progressive International put together a set of reflections that trace its history and update the proposals for the 21st century.)

In March last year, the World Council of Churches and several global communions of churches repeated their call for a New International Financial and Economic Architecture (NIFEA). “It is immoral that over a billion people – half of them children – subsist in poverty whilst billionaires increased their wealth by over 15% in 2024 to US$15 trillion. It is outrageous that the richest 10% of the global population receives more than half of global income, whereas the poorest half earns merely 8.5% of it,” they said in a statement.

They expressed deep concern about “a rapidly escalating climate and biodiversity emergency that jeopardises livelihoods and poses an existential threat to all life.” It notes that “several tipping points are close to being crossed or have already been crossed, leading us to recognise that we may be beyond a point of no return.”

The old order is dead. The time in which we are living demands we do better.