COP 25 4th post: “We Got Owned” – Full-Blown Political Depression

I'm getting lazy; all links are below, not inserted

It's been a long news-cycle time since I've been able to blog on this. Inertia, depression, a fuck-it-all affect, cloud cover, constant rain in Spain, all that. So many losses recently, meaning so many diminished possibilities, so much more clouds of doom. A feeling humankind is stupid, greedy, hopeless -- all of 'em "turkeys voting for Christmas". But an analytic realization also that it isn't popular will at all so much as clever manipulators of the levers of "democracy" that have resulted in such a string of losses in USA, Brazil, Bolivia, Britain all with direct consequences at the COP 25.
The COP 25 concluded with a very compromised agreement. It was widely judged a failure. The grim recap on Democracy Now tells the story in detail...
The failure was mainly due to the intransigence of USA and Brazil, said reports. So the minority white supremacist neo-fascists, elected through gross manipulation of their "democracies", are to blame.
Or it's human nature – the comforts we enjoy, the luxury environments of the petroleum age, the innumerable safeties and conveniences that permeate every aspect of modern life. We are carbon-exhaling methane-expelling animals, and the world is our comfy den.
The ragged unsatisfying disappointing end to the COP 25 in Madrid plunged me into a depression. Can this collective world failure by the old white oil men who run our reality have any upside?
At least the screaming has gotten a little louder. People are going to jump into their cars anyhow and head off to – places they might could walk, bike or take a bus to, but they might feel a twinge of guilt on how they lead their lives. You think? The individual behavior solution...
Wait. Is it my job to be upset and depressed? Is that the best you can do? I spent a good deal of my youth upset about US foreign policy, about the vicious behavior of imperium. On that front, nothing has much changed. It’s just now less out of sight, thanks to global mediasphere. We follow in the footsteps of de las Casas and Mark Twain in bitching about it, and trying to raise the old hue and cry…

Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced.
-- James Baldwin, quoted by XR at rebellion.earth

Blood Debt – Carbon Over-Spending and the Question of Loss & Damage

I’ve written in earlier posts about the mistreatment of indigenous peoples in frontline communities. It’s nothing new. These are the people under the cow-catcher of the railroad train of progress. They’re still being shot down in the South American countryside by who-knows-who, and investigated by the officials of who-really-cares. And in Canada, the Mounties are getting ready to shoot to kill indigenous water protectors resisting oil pipeline construction across their unceded lands.

Cutout for faces at the exhibition “Devuélvannos el oro” (give us back the gold), produced by the Colectivo Ayllu at the Matadero cultural center during the Afroconciencia festival, 2018. (See the book as a PDF, link below.)

Who Will Pay?

But as tiny island nations are already disappearing, and millions stand to be displaced – the big question of how to construct a sufficient global response to climate change remains unaddressed.
Saleemul Huq explains in UN-ese: “The specific technical point here in Madrid … is something called the review of the Warsaw International Mechanism on Loss and Damage. The developing countries have a united front here. We want that review to take it forward with an implementation arm and a finance arm. And the finance part is something that the United States is completely against. And so far we haven’t got a decision on that." Huq is a climate scientist and director of the International Centre for Climate Change and Development in Bangladesh, advising the bloc of Least Developed Countries in the climate negotiations.

The Law

Just as in “the resistance” to Rump in USA, people involved in the UN process turn to law. And, while authoritarians from Rump to Netanyahu are openly contemptuous of legal process, it does serve to bend opinion of those who value civil society, norms of behavior, and not being capriciously murdered by others.
It is the intention of the IAI’s International Tribunal on Evictions (mentioned in the previous post) to create a different class of human rights. Climate refugees have no rights. The Central Americans moving to the North Ameican border can only claim asylum based on persecution by governments, rights – (non-respected as even those were) – based upon the tragedies of the last major war.
Lawyers work for the villains in the piece as well, as the notorious right-wing ALEC group designs copycat legislation to repress water defenders, those who oppose and resist pipeline construction in North America.

As for Art….

The famous whale of my earlier posts finally made its appearance on the streets of Madrid, although I missed the parade. It was the centerpiece, the symbolic casket, in a funeral march for the death of the seas – Marcha de los Mares Muertos. As a peninsular country with a large fishing indusry, Spain is more sensitive to problems of the sea. The great inland sea lake, Mar Menor, suffers high pollution, a crisis marked by recent mass asphyxiations of thousands of fishes.

This funeral procession was first assayed in England. A byproduct of the switch of COP location from South America to Europe was that suddenly many English and European activists could come. XR groups could share skills and contacts. While I could wish that some more of my friends on the art left had been involved, the solidarity shown the indigenxs and XR internationals by Madrid’s institutions was generous – from the UGT union building in the city center given over to serve as an impromptu hostel and organizing center to the multi-purpose building on the UCM campus which was the site of the Cumbre Social meetings.
(I can’t really imagine that level of institutional soldarity from the milquetoast institutions of the USA, although we’ll see what happens in Milwaukee during the 2020 Democratic convention.)
All of this was a relief after the eviction of La Ingobernable had deprived Madrid’s left of a central city organizing site.

Elite Art Influencers

I popped into one institutional art event, a “COP25 side event,” at the Caixa Forum organized by @artofchange21, supported by the French Schneider Electric Foundation. They had an exhibition up in Chile, where a lot of climate-related events went on.
The idea of the project is to present artists and entrepreneurs together. Very neoliberal, yeah, or as one artivist on my Telegram group said, “a crock of shite.” Even so, ideas are ideas, and we can all use more of them.
The Madrid talk was sparsely attended, evidence of the lack of lead time institutions need to mobilize their cadres of indentured learners (students). How much more useful, I imagine, might this event have been had it been presented at the Cumbre Social at UCM?
Fernando Garcia Dory of Campo Adentro was on the panel, which lured me. A ruralist intellectual, Garcia Dory comes from social movements. He received a prize from Creative Time, which is how I met him. Campo Adentro later organized an informational event for students at the Reina Sofia museum. The work of the group is the most sophisticated I know on behalf of rural food producers and the local food movement.

John Gerrard: Western Flag (Spindletop, Texas) 2017; part of the presentation, at the Thyssen museum in Madrid during COP 25; very sophisticated artwork, an animation

Michael Pinsky won my heart as a lifelong hater of cars. The artist designer built “pollution pods” at the COP25 conference site, working with perfumers to generate simulations of pollution levels in different cities inside a chain of transparent bubble domes. Example: Delhi has a pollution index around 1000; Madrid is around 30. Suddenly I understood that earlier mask workshop I had dismissed as child’s play. For that level of respiratory distress, there is no coca you can chew.
I was reminded of Brother Nut's project in Beijing, to make bricks out of the pollution int he air. Rather art-of-changey in itself, Nut was working off a Dutch engineer’s machine to extract partculates from air.

Nut Brother with Beijing smog brick. Hindustan Times photo

Both projects are about making it real. Like old-timey London “fog” (not fog at all but smokestack industrial pollution), this is now something people in developed countries rarely experience.

Movement of Movements?

The climate action movement is not new. But the issue has grown like Topsy, vaccuming up many other social concerns to add to its insistent pre-eminence.

This was signalled a few years ago by Naomi Klein with her book "This Changes Everything” (multiple summaries appear online).

Klein had already advanced the thesis that, while “disaster capitalism” seizes upon moments of collective trauma to make authoritarian economic and political changes, disasters also bring out the solidarity impulse among the people directly affected. This offers a path for social movements, seized early on in 2012 when elements of the Occupy Wall Street movement turned out to provide hurricane relief as Occupy Sandy (the name of the storm). Yates McKee’s book Strike Art tells this story well.
Bad climate events are offering local movements unlooked-for chances to expand and mobilize people. Activists are taking advantage of governments that either can’t or won’t help fast enough, or at all.
Katrina with G.W. Bush, and Maria under Rump are clear examples. While the anarchist solidarity groups active after Katrina, as chronicled by Scott Crow, are little known, self-organized relief efforts impulsed by anarchists in Puerto Rico have been better publicized.
The website Shareable.net has just published a manual in PDF for this kind of solidarity, “The Response: Building Collective Resilience in the Wake of Disasters”.

“Tell the Truth”

XR activists hoist boats in demonstrations emblazoned with that motto. And, while the near-unanimous scientific predictions don’t seem to hold public attention, many artists bet that stories will. Storylabs, sharings of climate grief, prizes for the best ones, songs – all of this is becoming part of the quickly arising climate culture.
“We thought there was more time,” wrote Enmedio in their pitch for the Sound Swarm action, “or that climate change would somehow be resolved by experts with technological magic, but no. Right now, with the 6th mass extinction looming on the horizon, we continue the same orgy of consumerism that provoked this crisis.”
The television programs continue to urge us to recycle, conserve water, etc., in between their advertisements for automobiles. They can’t say what scientists have been telling us, that the key problem is the burning of fossil fuels.

It’s Still Resistance Culture

For the 20 year anniversary of the Seattle WTO protests (Nov. 30 – Dec. 1, 1999), Robby Herbst posted his recollection of this watershed activist event in North America to Facebook (11/29/19). The co-editor of the Journal of Aesthetics & Protest had been involved in the setup of the first Indymedia venture which reported on the demonstrations in the street. (I followed that exciting live-time website, and recall persistent attempts to hack it via the comments sections.) Robby said he missed the international network that opposed the global ministerial conferences like WTO in Seattle – the “global justice movement” – and praised its ad hoc infrastructure.
That infrastructure is still a little there, as I saw in the Koch Kollectiv feeding people at the Cumbre, and also on the street during the march. The people running those kitchens today were mostly children during the era of WTO protests. I delight to see the long strands of popular resistance.
“Twenty years on,” Robby writes, “I’m comforted to know that the movements that have come up since then, BLM Occupy #Metoo etc, are informed by what has come before – in spite of the fact that much of the meat spaces that informed us, like info-shops and zines and free-culture, have gone ephemeral or been commoditized.... Though in the day to day it gets clouded with some of the timidness of existence, 20 years ago in Seattle we proved another world is possible, and today that proof is still there waiting to grow from that fecund mess we call the capitalist empire”.
Next year, Extinction Rebellion and the Indigenous Environmental Network will try to add another radical mass movement to Robby’s list. On to Glasgow….

Links below the note.
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NOTE on climate and food refugees –
Quoting Hossein Ayazi, policy analyst with the Global Justice Program at the Othering & Belonging Institute at the University of California, Berkeley and co-author of the report, “Climate Refugees: The Climate Crisis and Rights Denied”:
“Crop failures and droughts in the Central American Dry Corridor [were] behind the Central American migration caravan, the migrant caravan, that dominated [U.S.] news cycles last year." We didn't hear about that. We heard about criminal gangs threatening their lives. The framing of that was not climate refugees. The migrants can only claim refugee status presently based on criminal or political threats to their lives. Ayazi continues, while we refer to climate-induced displaced persons as “climate refugees,” “this is actually not a legally recognized term; [it] is not a term within international refugee protections.” It is “fundamentally impossible to tie a specific climate-related natural disaster to a specific actor of persecution, whether it’s a corporation — fossil fuel corporations or fossil fuel-dependent industrial processes."
Most displacement is internal, where people have some rights within nations. Those who cross international borders have no such rights. The concept "petro-persecution” is invoked to de-link the legal concept of "persecution" from territory – where “the actor of persecution is actually our global dependence upon fossil fuels and the global investment patterns behind this dependence."
There are also "food refugees", people displaced due to "land grabs or natural resource grabs, seed monopolies, international free trade agreements — basically, what people might describe as the corporate food regime or corporate food system."
This attempt to build a new legal definition of refugee status, aligned with the IAH tribunal of climate refugees mentioned in this blogs’ previous post, is a thinking beyond the simple ideological commitment to open borders. That sentiment of humanitarian internationalism remains unconvincing to legions of U.S. and EU voters who are swayed by nationalist arguments from the right.

Enmedio collective Sound Swarm during Climate March

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LINKS

“grim recap” – I quote the experts Saleemul Huq and Hossein Ayazi on the issues from: Democracy Now wrapup, on Portside.org
|COP25 Was a Failure, But Activists’ Collective Organizing at the Talks Was Unprecedented; Amy Goodman with Tasneem Essop, Asad Rehman, and others
https://portside.org/2019-12-17/cop25-was-failure-activists-collective-organizing-talks-was-unprecedented?

“getting ready to shoot” – Canadian police ready to kill to protect Coastal GasLink pipeline against Indians.
"Founded in 2009, Unist’ot’en camp was the first among a constellation of Indigenous-led uprisings against fossil fuel pipelines in North America – including Keystone XL, Trans Mountain, Enbridge Line 3, Dakota Access and Bayou Bridge.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/dec/20/canada-indigenous-land-defenders-police-documents

“Devuélvannos el oro” book download
https://www.traficantes.net/libros/devu%C3%A9lvannos-el-oro

Mar Menor, Murcia, Spain
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mar_Menor

Carlos Prieto, "Muerte del Mar Menor: el informe ignorado que alertó de la catástrofe hace 20 años"
https://www.elconfidencial.com/tecnologia/ciencia/2019-11-25/mar-menor-murcia-cartagena-peces-muertos_2346788/

“Brother Nut's project in Beijing” – Chinese artist uses 'vacuum cleaner' to turn smog into brick
By Matt Rivers, CNN, December 8, 2015
https://edition.cnn.com/2015/12/08/asia/china-pollution-artist/index.html

“multiple summaries appear online” – one is at Resilience.or: Naomi Klein, “This Changes Everything” summary
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2014-12-28/heft-notes-naomi-klein-s-this-changes-everything/

“Occupy Sandy” activism – E-flux discussion around the book "Strike Art: Contemporary Art and the Post-Occupy Condition,” by Yates McKee, London & NYC: Verso Books, 2016
https://conversations.e-flux.com/t/strike-art-question-1-lets-talk-about-yates-mckees-2016-book-on-art-activism-occupy/3483

“The website Shareable.net has published a manual” – “The Response: Building Collective Resilience in the Wake of Disasters”
https://www.shareable.net/series/disaster-collectivism/

Indigenous Environmental Network project
https://indigenousrising.org/

3rd Post – “The Crying COP”

Indigenxs at the COP 25. Photo from XR Madrid Twitter feed.

"This is the crying COP."
– Bill Hare, Australian scientist with Climate Analytics, interviewed on Democracy Now

This blog is spozed to cover collective and collaborative work In the field of art. Most I’ve considered has been political, and much of it explicitly so. This recent series of posts is about work around the COP 25 meeting in Madrid, where the “art” component, called “artivism” has been primarily direct actions, launched by the relatively new group Extinction Rebellion – XR.
I wasn’t part of the affinity groups which launched these actions, nor did I see them. My information comes from mainstream media, mainly the online Democracy Now and broadcast La Sexta channel in Spain, and social media – Facebook, Twitter, and the Telegram streams of the XR artivist groups.
That’s how I learned about #SoundSwarm, the work of the Enmedio collective which includes originators of the word “artivism” (the coinage came during the Global Justice Movement) – and the “Disco-becience”, two hours of dancing in the Gran Via shopping street to disrupt holiday consumption – and the “oil” vomiting at the COP site itself, carried out by XR.
There have been other actions at the main COP site as well. But the main actions of the indigenous groups have been stage occupations and walkouts. These are old-school political actions by the beleaguered minority. They are cries of rage and frustration, as the majority moves on without them – refusing to help indigenous land and water defenders; and refusing to put a leash on oil gas and mining industries.

"Land Back" – "Oceans Back"
– International Climate Action Network (CAN) banner slogans

Traditional indigenous people live off the land, and they feel first the impacts. Both north and south, First Nation peoples are pressed by the continuation and expansion of resource extraction and the workers, including corporate and government thugs, who invade indigenous lands to continue their violent plunder.
“Stop Climate Colonialism” banner slogan condemns the insidious carbon trading scheme. This weird financial product resembles the medieval sale of indulgences, although in this case Mother Church is capitalism itself.

Quentin Massys, “The Money Changer and His Wife” (1514)

If Trump’s USA has left the COP, why are the corporations still here, watering down every measure, with the European nations right behind them?, asked Karin Nansen, Friends of the Earth International. It’s necropolitics.
Wednesday Democracy Now reported the dramatic protest by indigenous land defenders and their allies at the COP 25 conference zone which climaxed in a walk-out. The action happens during the on-screen interviews with leaders of Indigenous Environmental Network and Friends of the Earth. Tom B.K. Goldtooth warns them, Don’t go, you’ll lose your badges. That is just what happened. Some were arrested, others were “debadged” so they could not re-enter the COP. (Video is about 18 min. with transcript.)

https://www.democracynow.org/2019/12/11/cop25_walkout_indigenous_leaders_global_south

Second half of the Wednesday walkout broadcast on Thursday -- talking outside.…
It wasn’t exactly a “walkout”, but rather a kettling by UN security forcing protestors out of the conference and into the cold for hours.

https://www.democracynow.org/2019/12/12/cop25_protesters_forced_out_of_summit

“Matriarchy Is Not the Opposite of Patriarchy”

In the room named for Camilo Catrillanca, a Mapuche farmer killed by Chilean police last year, I attended an IEN talk on indigenous feminism. My partner wanted to go, so I went along. I did not get the names of the two speakers (could they have been with the Indigenous Feminist Organizing School?), but the talk was fascinating. One of them, from the Minnesota Anishinaabe people, spoke from historical perspective.
The two women do workshops on indigenous feminism lasting several days. They are trying to “right the imbalance that was created by patriarchal colonialism. … Matriarchy,” she said, “is not the opposite of patriarchy.”

Chilean Mapuche activist Camilo Catrillanca (image by Gabriel Jímenez y Patricio Morales; eldesconcierto.cl)

A major issue among North American natives now is the missing and murdered indigenous women (MMIW). Many if not most of these crimes relate to places where extraction is happening – mining, oil and timber.

This Matter is Murder

Women are delberately attacked, she said, because they are the backbone of native societies and lead activism. “Violence on the land goes with violence on the body” of women. She spoke of traditional native culture, and of the centuries of attacks by white governance on their education, food systems, governance – in all of which women had strong roles.
Her mother was active in AIM (American Indian Movement) during the 1970s. Because of “terrible health care”, she said, “I am now older than my mother and grandmother lived to be.” She was not able to learn things from them. “Patriarchy has robbed me of my matriarchal line,” the knowledges and practices that should have been hers.
When the trade in beaver skins developed in the 18th and 19th century (Astor Place), the colonists would only trade and negotiate with the men. This had been women’s traditional role. Thus the tribal system was upended. Only men were trained and hired to be writers and recorders, she said. We are still living with that “introduced patriarchy” among our men.

Vomiting “petroleum” at COP 25. Photo from XR Madrid Facebook page.

Subsequent impositions of systems of governance modelled on U.S. systems limited or eliminated the role of women in decision making.
(This has been very clear in the many clashes between “traditionals” – tribal elders, both men and women, coming from traditional systems of governance – and elected tribal leaders and bodies of governance set up by U.S. agencies. The latter tend to be the ones that sign extraction contracts with oil gas and mining companies.)

Lunch and a Tribunal

The Cumbre Social was extremely lively during its first few days, before people emptied out to go do actions at the COP itself, which was far away.
We ate our lunch that day, at a stand outside run with Campo Adentro, a long-running artistic project that visibilizes herders in rural communities. Earlier children and their parents had waited by the forest across the street, but the transhumante animal herd scheduled for the parking lot never showed up. Even so, we enjoyed a simple guisado with meat and vegetables as a herder, wearing a reflective vest and leaning on his staff, stood by.
Next I looked in on the International Tribunal on Evictions organized by the International Alliance of Inhabitants. This group, long active in NGO level defense of both rural and urban peoples’ housing occupations, has been producing live-streamed presentations of cases of climate related displacements. “We are not insects!”, to be pushed from one place to another without provision. The first case was Venice, Italy, where “extinction tourism” has emerged. Come, enjoy the ruin your way of life is creating.

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LINKS

Missing and murdered Indigenous women - Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Missing_and_murder...
The missing and murdered Indigenous women epidemic (MMIW) is an issue currently affecting Indigenous people in Canada and the United States,

The American Indian Movement, 1968-1978
Overview and set of Primary Sources
https://dp.la/primary-source-sets/the-american-indian-movement-1968-1978

Campo Adentro - Inland
https://inland.org

International Tribunal on Evictions – by the International Alliance of Inhabitants (IAH)
https://www.tribunal-evictions.org

Transhumancia -- the seasonal passage of the animal herds – through the center of Madrid, n.d.. Campo Adentro herders were to bring sheep to the Cumbre Social, but the herd ended up along the Manzanares river, in the ecological corridor there

Fridays for Future at COP 25

Banner drop with the words of Greta Thunberg by the Kletter Kinder

This COP conference blew up very fast. Originally scheduled for Chile, it was moved to Madrid very late. A lot of reorganizing took place. For one thing, masses of Extinction Rebellion activists from UK who had not planned on going to COP in Chile were able to make the trip to Madrid.
I’ve not been following this issue and this activism here. In Milwaukee, USA, however, there have been important “artivist” actions in solidarity with Voces de la Frontera for immigrant rights, and with Native Americans around water rights and extractive industry. Susan Simensky Bietila has been working with the tribes upstate, and Nicolas Lampert organized “art builds” in Milwaukee with David Solnit. Lampert also participated in the COP 21 in Paris in 2015, which saw some large-scale creative actions.
I was a worker in Solnit and Lampert’s art build, painting color onto screenprinted banners. Production was directed from the top, and it was clear what to do. This was my idea of what might happen in Madrid. Wrong. Meetings to plan “artivism” at CS Seco and CS Tabacalera did not produce any clear plans that I could see. In the end, groups formed with their own projects and turned up at the march to execute them.

from 20minutos

There were numerous wall exhibitions at the convergence space, the UGT union building on calle de Hortaleza in central Madrid, between the barrios Chueca and Malasaña. There were more still at the UCM university building given over the social summit, which started the weekend of December 7-8.

I Only Want to Help

Although I knew I would blog, I mainly wanted to help. Finally, dear reader, I make an inadequate reporter. These posts are collages of reports from a sprawling and complex series of events in which multiple groups acted together but apart, with only tactical coordination. My key question has been, “What can I do” to support this activism? In the end it turns out that it is writing.
For a couple of days I ran around the convergence space, putting up some of the great climate justice posters produced by the Just Seeds group, and helping out here and there. Bustling about and seeing what needed doing, I was not unsociable but remained unconnected.
I found the room where the whale was being built, after it was moved from CS Seco. A young bearded man was working on a part of the head, laboriously covering cardboard with newspaper. It seemed impossible that the skeleton could be ready for the Friday march. He was working with a young woman. She told me they were activists from Israel. She was a veteran of lockdown actions. I’m too old for that, I said. An old woman participates in our actions, she said, and the police treat her very nicely. When they all started going limp and flopping around, the police brought wheelchairs to take them away.

Big Heads on the March

In the main artivist room, the Chileans were hard at work. Their contingent was the largest and most present, both in the march and in the social summit that followed. They had started with graphic support for their #ChaoCarbon campaign to scotch the government’s plans for a chain of coal-fired power plants in Chile. This included a kind of coal-power-plant face pasted onto cardboard, and some balloon-based heads of political villains. The power-plant face showed up a lot, including behind Greta Thunberg when she spoke at the COP.

The Chileans had plenty of people, most working on the balloon heads which were laboriously built up. Piles of art gear were strewn about. There was a workshop on making jellyfish. A group of young men were stenciling “Sail to the COP” on dark blue t-shirts. They were from Amsterdam. Another bunch from their group had in fact sailed to the COP, but in Chile. Their boat was in the Caribbean. Perhaps they could go to Miami Art Basel?
The “artivism” that Extinction Rebellion does is more performative direct action. It is planned in secret and executed for maximum publicity. As a result, most of what they did I saw on commercial TV. In an action at the COP itself, XR activists stripped their tops, and painted slogans on their bodies. They covered their nipples with strips of black tape to avoid the recent media blackout of Femin actions.
Spanish TV has covered the COP 25 events fairly well. They valorized Greta Thunberg, the young Swedish activist who reversed her sailing trip to Chile to make a dramatic appearance in Madrid. She first arrived in Portugal, disembarking from her sailboat, then traveled “secretly” aboard a train to Madrid. “Hello Spanish TV,” she said as she walked along the platform surrounded by media.

Greta Smiles

Later she gave a press conference with other young activists at the Casa Encendida cultural center. Watching her on TV so far, she seems most comfortable with other children (of course), smiling only in their company. She is a very effective speaker, with just the right note of urgency in her young voice.
The march on Friday, December 6 coincided with Fridays for Future, the youth movement that follows Greta Thunberg. The organizers – “Marcha por el Clima de Madrid” – estimated the crowd at 500,000; the government claimed 15,000. It was big, for sure. The route was long, about seven kilometers from Atocha station roundabout to Nuevo Ministerios.

We joined the march over an hour after its formal beginning time. As we walked we tired, and the march itself staggered greatly, with huge gaps opening up. At one point, the procession split. As we walked back I saw the CGT, the anarchist union. Malena said yes, the CNT, the other anarchist union, had been on the other street!, although I hadn’t seen them. (Weirdly, these unions split in the 1980s.)
As we passed a highway bridge along the route, a banner drop happened. It was @KletterKinder, the climbing kids, proclaiming Greta Thunberg’s words – “How dare you?!”

“How Dare You?!”

We arrived near the head of the march where a giant screen had been mounted. We could barely glimpse it, but heard the later words of Greta Thunberg clearly, her urgent voice, then the low rumble of Javier Bardem, the most prominent Spanish celebrity to back the cause. Although many saw and heard the speakers, most would arrive long after the formal presentations had finished. They heard the music; we left before.

Since the march started so late the sun set, and much of the route was dim-to-dark. The photos I made were poor. Many marchers had anticipated the darkness, and a number of banners and signs were lit with light-strips. The “medusas” – jellyfish carried on sticks – were all lit up as well. I’d seen the workshop in the art space, but the group made them somewhere else, so I can’t report how they did them. (Lots of plastic, surely.) A jolly feminist contingent carried most of these, and it was an impressive array.
All the music made a strong impact as the march dragged on. We saw a big drum corps from Galicia – a brass marching band – a lone piper with a drummer, and the occasional kid with a drum. A small group of women parked themselves where the road divided, and sang choral songs, old left classics. Many stopped to join them, and spirits were lifted.

“We’re Fucked”

We turned and walked back along the route of the march, seeing the later arrivals. The giant balloon globe with a burning fuse of Greenpeace – a tall walking puppet which interacted with the people around it, creating a mobile performative environment – of course the big-head Chilean politicians, cabezudos – and a swinging crowd of the Extinction Rebels, the XR group, hundreds of them, carrying flags on sticks, with a banner slogan “We’re fucked”.

One bunch of them cried out against Trump – “Es un fracaso! Eres un payaso!” (In unpoetic English: “It’s a disaster! You’re a clown!”)
The most ambitious and wildly energetic of all was the Sound Swarm, organized by Enmedio collective. These black clad performers, carrying round green signs backed with black-and-white images of extinct animals and human skulls, ran, leaped, and lay down in the street as they made various sustained sounds and noises.
These veteran artivists proclaimed the Sound Swarm to be “a participatory orchestra of loudspeakers, a noisy swarm of angry bees agitating everything in its path. An acoustic and visual experiment that, if successful, should help us occupy our bodies, rediscover the shape of our skulls and re-inhabit our skeleton’s skeleton, while giving a shout-out to endangered species and the sacred art of life itself.”

As we walked past the end of the march, a dozen garbage trucks and street sweepers were moving in to sweep up – nothing. The march was abnormally clean.
Oh, the whale! It seems that it made it onto the streets after all, on Sunday, although I didn’t hear about it.

LINKS

“Art in Action in Milwaukee, Wisconsin: Sculptures created to bring awareness about the need for water protection and the explosive crude fracked oil brought by rail through the center of the city.” 2018.
By Susan Simensky Bietila (gated site; few free articles allowed)
https://www.thenation.com/article/art-in-action-in-milwaukee-wisconsin/

Activist Art at COP 21 Climate Conference Paris 2015
by Nicolas Lampert
https://justseeds.org/activist-art-at-cop-21-climate-conference-paris-2015/

#ChaoCarbon campaign
Artists have played an important role in this campaign against coal power in Chile.
http://www.chilesustentable.net

Kate Brown, “‘All Culture Is Going to Trash as Soon as the Food Runs Out’: Why Extinction Rebellion’s Climate Activists Are Targeting Art Basel Miami Beach”, December 3, 2019
https://news.artnet.com/market/extinction-rebellion-art-basel-miami-beach-1718208

Enmedio collective's Sound Swarm
http://www.enmedio.info/en/sound-swarm-enjambre-sonoro/

The whale on Sunday
“El movimiento Extinction Rebellion marcha en Madrid por ‘los océanos muertos’”
https://www.elespanol.com/ciencia/20191208/movimiento-extinction-rebellion-marcha-madrid-oceanos-muertos/450455302_0.html

"Artivism" at COP 25: About a Whale

November 12, 2019, MADRID – It was the last night of the Ingobernable social center. No one knew, but the next morning it would be evicted. I waited outside with the rest for the usual 7 p.m. opening to join the Extinction Rebellion assembly. A young man with lipstick and painted nails opened. Upstairs some two dozen people were walking around singing, practicing a chorale for the “funeral for the seas” to be part of the big demonstration Friday for the COP 25. The Cumbre Social por el Clima Madrid 2019 – the Social Summit – would begin the next day. (The Democracy Now video program will cover that event during the week December 8-13.)
The young man, named Lukas, told me they were also making a giant whale skeleton for the procession. Saturday they would start. It had been a while since I was in La Ingob, and new wall paintings had appeared. I must bring my camera on Saturday, I thought.
But Saturday there was no meeting. The morning after my visit, La Ingobernable was evicted. Instead of whale-building there was a huge crowd of people out front of the barricades erected by the police. More than a thousand rallied to yell their rage at the loss. A tweet urged people to come with flowers to mourn the closure, but I may have been the only one carrying a sunflower. Everyone else was angry, yelling: “One eviction, another occupation!” Pablo Carmona, a councilman in the last city government unseated by the rightwing, wrote that there was never a chance for legalization of La Ingobernable. The foot-dragging of the unseated left city council may have cost them their base in the last election.
Ten years ago, Pablo Carmona had taken me to visit CSO Seco, my first squatted social center in Madrid. (I blogged the visit on this site at the time.) Seco in 2009 was in an old school building. It’s logo was the pink panther. After eviction and a loud demonstration, the collective had been given a room in a corner of a newly constructed city social center in the deeps of Vallekas, amidst an all new urbanization. It was there that the construction of the giant whale skeleton was to continue.

Anatomically Correct

Lukas’ plan for the piece was anatomically correct, which meant building up layer upon layer of newspaper and paper tape on thin cardboard shapes to make the massive whale vertebrae. I did three which could then be papier mached, then painted. The ribs were more elaborate, requiring wire armatures. The skeleton parts were later moved to a room in central Madrid. The UGT union building at c/ Horateleza 88, was given over to activists coming for the official COP 25 and its aftermath, the social summit. Ecologistas en Acción has an office there, and I am guessing that very active nationwide organization played a key role in securing this excellent site for the activists of the social summit.

The ribs of the whale at CSO Seco

The building was buzzing when I visited. Rooms had become dormitories, and were just beginning to fill up. Many were named for murdered indigenous activists Chico Mendes and Berta Caceres. One for Mariella Franco. There is a Standing Rock room as well. Indigenous people are the ones on the front lines against primitive extractive capital – mining, dam-building, oil and gas drilling. It is their lands and waters being ravaged.
5 December – journal extract: I am on the subway to the UGT convergence center with a giant cardboard box. It’s a beauty – 123x49 cm, from a “digital signage” device. It can make four great solid paper fish for the funeral of the seas. The “artivist” party is tonight. I wonder if I’ll meet someone I know? Or… what can one do? What one can is all, and that’s a bit done. It seems pitifully little, but cardboard is heavy in quantity, even this one box.
Reflecting on all the people killed defending resources – land, trees, water, animals. They are not only “resources” but the beautiful raiment of our earth. It is fitting to call these “wars”. And these are new kinds of deaths…. Although not for indigenous peoples!
The dimensions of the coming action are clear in the people gathering in the UGT building claimed for the COP week as a convergence center. They are coming from all over Europe, with many from South America since the Chileans are taking the lead in organizing the social challenge to the COP which was displaced from their country on account of the persistent unrest. (Over a million were on the streets of Santiago in late October.)

Trying to Be Useful

I printed out a bunch of posters I found online. Most are from the invaluable JustSeeds cooperative website. I run around the UGT building putting them up on the wall. These are excellent designs, many from the NYC Climate Strike earlier this year, and others from COP 21 in Paris 2015. I think they are much better than the XR posters, and better by far than the bland UN and NGO produced images.

I run into Terry Craven of the Desperate Literature bookstore; he’s doing finance for Extinction Rebellion, and quickly falls into conversation with a group of English. As he passes, I tell him I’m trying to boost morale for the people who are sleeping and eating in the center.
That is a lot of what is going on in our lives now, not only among climate activists and the many indigenous people here. Things are continuously changing at a pace which is hard to conceive, and is demoralizing. One group at this COP social summit is dedicated to helping people to cope with the sadness they feel. Reason alone can’t help when the problem is so grand, so systemic, so entirely engrained in the way we live our lives. Climate change means life change.

What’s In the Belly of the Whale

That’s right – plastic.
Last night on TV channel 6 (“La Sexta”) broadcast “Vivir sin plástico”, living without plastic which is a plague in the world’s oceans. It was astonishing, saddening, sobering to see how completely our lives have been permeated by this material. While initially modelled on insect waxes and resins, modern plastic is made from petroleum and has a functionally eternal life. Scraps of discarded single-use plastic are used by sea animals as sites to deposit eggs, which are eaten by turtles and whales. Every commercial haul of fish brings up a large quantity of discarded plastic which fishermen deposit in special containers on the docks.

How did we get along without this material? How did food circulate? It’s hard to remember grocery shopping before plastic bags. Food was shopped in baskets, cans, paper bags, and glass containers. In Spain, all glass bottles had a few centimes deposit and had to be returned for cleaning and refilling.
I was a hippie in college, and acquired the habit of buying food in bulk, recycling and composting. This hasn’t been possible to maintain living in big cities. NYC has numerous health food stores which support aspects of a plastic-free lifeway. (Not any longer a “style” but a “way”, yea.) Most people don’t shop at them, nor do they live like that. Now, living abroad, the Spanish food distribution system is really into plastic, and “bio” stores are few and underdeveloped compared to their US counterparts.
The way I lived as a student 50 years ago is the way we need to live again now.

NEXT: The Big Procession

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LINKS

Pablo Carmona, "Cómo gobernar a La Ingobernable. Relatos de una negociación imposible"
https://www.elsaltodiario.com/tribuna/como-gobernar-a-la-ingobernable-relatos-de-una-negociacion-imposible

"2019 Chilean protests" at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Chilean_protests

Desperate Literature | Librería Interhttps://desperateliterature.com/nacional — Madrid.

Subjects | Environment & Climate - Justseeds
https://justseeds.org/subject/environment-climate/?js-post-type=product

Climate change activism - The Independent
https://www.independent.co.uk › ... › Education News
28 nov. 2019 - 'Standing shoulder to shoulder with activists helps overcome sense of powerlessness,' head says ...

Vivir sin plástico: dos familias eliminan el plástico de su vida durante un mes
https://www.lasexta.com/noticias/medio-ambiente/vivir-plastico-dos-familias-eliminan-plastico-vida-mes_201912035de6b9360cf255871f1bc570.html

Vivir sin plástico - Acompáñanos en nuestro camino hacia una ...
https://vivirsinplastico.com/

100 Steps to a Plastic-Free Life
https://myplasticfreelife.com/plasticfreeguide/

The vertebrae of the great whale at CSO Seco