Socialist Voice (Canada)
Women’s rights, population and climate change: The debate continues
Introduction
Climate and Capitalism recently published a debate between Betsy Hartmann and Laurie Mazur about campaigns that promote family planning and reproductive health programs as means of slowing population growth and fighting global warming.
The site subsequently published a reply to Laurie Mazur in which Ian Angus argued: “The combination of population reduction and women’s rights was already like oil and water. Adding CO2 reductions to the mix only makes things worse.”
Canadian meetings salute 10 years of Venezuelan revolution (Feb 26-March 7, 2010)
Two Caracas-based activists, Federico Fuentes and Kiraz Janicke, will speak in Toronto, Kingston, Ottawa, Montreal, Victoria and Vancouver between February 26 and March 7, in a tour organised by the Centre for Social Justice and the Venezuela We Are with You Coalition in Toronto.
Their tour takes place at a decisive turning point in the Venezuelan revolutionary process, as US-backed rightist forces escalate attacks on the movement of working people and the Bolivarian government.
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Related article
Venezuela’s revolution faces crucial Battles ahead
by Federico Fuentes
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During the eleven years since Hugo Chavez was elected as president of Venezuela, his country has become a focus of hope on a world scale. At the Copenhagen climate conference, Venezuela helped lead the countries calling for international social and ecological justice.
`Population Justice' -- Blaming Third World women for global warming
By Ian Angus
January 31, 2010 -- Climate and Capitalism -- For more than two centuries, the idea that the world’s ills are caused by poor people having too many babies has been remarkably successful at diverting attention from the complex social causes of poverty and injustice.
Forty years ago, Paul Ehrlich’s bestseller The Population Bomb applied the idea to environmental problems:
The causal chain of deterioration is easily followed to its source. Too many cars, too many factories, too much detergent, too much pesticide, multiplying contrails. Inadequate sewage treatment plants, too little water, too much carbon dioxide – all can be traced easily to too many people.[1]
Ehrlich’s book convinced many environmentalists, and led to the formation of a variety of groups that focused solely on the supposed evils of overpopulation.
Today, as women’s rights activist Betsy Hartmann warns in a recent article, populationist arguments are back – but now groups such as the US-based Population Connection (formerly Zero Population Growth) and the UK’s Optimum Population Trust have added a “faux feminist twist” to their attacks on the reproductive rights of Third World women.
Honduras: Obama's new puppets on display; Massive demonstration as Lobo takes power
By Felipe Stuart Cournoyer, Managua
January 26, 2010 -- During the dubious Honduran election process leading up to voting day on November 27, 2009, the people would chant “Santos[1] de santo no tiene nada. Lobo de lobo lo tiene todo” ["(Elvin) Santos gets nothing from the saints; Lobo’s taken it all from the wolf.”]
People are not pollution -- Why climate activists should not support limits on immigration
Haitians plead: `Where is the help?'
January 15, 2010 -- Evidence of monstrous neglect of the Haitian people is mounting following the catastrophic earthquake three days ago. As life-saving medical supplies, food, water purification chemicals and vehicles pile up at the airport in Port-au-Prince, and as news networks report a massive international effort to deliver emergency aid, the people in the shattered city are wondering when they will see help.
January 9, 2010 – Sydney – The Canada/Quebec: Québécois denounce Supreme Court attack on language rights
By Richard Fidler
November 9, 2009 -- The October 22 ruling by the Supreme Court of Canada overturning yet another section of Quebec’s Charter of the French Language (CFL) has been met with angry protests by a broad range of opinion in the French-speaking province.
The court declared unconstitutional a law adopted unanimously by Quebec’s National Assembly in 2002 that closed a loophole in the charter being used to circumvent the requirement that Quebec students attend French-language schools. In effect, the judgment restores free choice of language of elementary schooling for parents rich enough to send their kids for a few years to private schools not funded by the Quebec government before enrolling them in English public schools.
Canada: Vale Inco strike shows need for international action
By Marc Bonhomme, translated by Richard Fidler
A Québécois militant, member of Québec solidaire, discusses the global implications of the strike by 3500 workers at Vale Inco, the world’s largest nickel mine, in Sudbury, Ontario.
November 11, 2009 -- Socialist Voice -- In France’s South Pacific colony of New Caledonia [Kanaky], a small delegation of Vale Inco strikers from Sudbury, in northeastern Ontario, most of them Franco-Ontarians, met in October with the union at the island’s Vale Inco nickel mine, due to open in 2010, although it threatens a UNESCO nature reserve. The newspaper Nouvelles calédoniennes reported the encounter, in its October 31 edition:
Hugo Blanco: Indigenous people are the vanguard of the fight to save the Earth
October 13, 2009 -- Socialist Voice -- Peruvian peasant leader Hugo Blanco, who edits the newspaper La Lucha Indigena, was interviewed on August 28, 2009, in Arequipa, in southern Peru. The previous day he gave a presentation at a conference entitled “40 Años de la Reforma Agraria” at the city’s Universidad Nacional de San Agustín.
You said last night that today the Indigenous peoples of the Amazon are in the vanguard of the struggle in Peru. Can you say more about this?
Positive developments in the European left
By Ian Angus