‘The Day the Planet Started to Win’
The people are revolting—in the very best meaning of that word.
An inspiring example of people rising up against a trifecta of economic, cultural, and political oppression has come to us from a community of seemingly powerless people living in a very isolated place. Long exploited, lied to, disrespected, and robbed, they revolted, daring to take on the biggest, richest, most politically connected industrial power on the globe: Big Oil.
Astonishingly, after a decade of protesting, organizing, coalition building, suing, petitioning, and otherwise resolutely rebelling against injustice, these tenacious people won an inspiring grassroots victory over Big Oil profiteering.
One reason you probably haven’t heard about it is because it didn’t happen in any of the usual centers of media focus, but rather in Ecuador’s Amazon rainforest. Also, the revolt wasn’t led by some brand-name environmental group or charismatic political honcho, but rather by the Tagaeri and Taromenane peoples and other Indigenous Huaorani people living in the rich biodiversity of Ecuador’s Yasuní National Park.
Directly challenging the exigent crisis of climate change, the Indigenous groups rallied the region’s young people into a potent political force. They successfully organized behind a national referendum on August 20 to ban oil drilling in the region, and to compel the profiteers to remove their wells and pipelines and pay for remediation and reforestation. Significantly, they specifically called for leaving oil in the ground so that it would not add to climate destruction. The ban is binding and unable to be overturned by future lobbyists and officials.
A resounding 59 percent of Ecuadorians voted “Yes!”
As Huaorani leader Nemonte Nenquimo told Al Jazeera, this was “the day the planet started to win.”
Breaking News: New Life for Local Newspapers
How about even more good news for a change? Specifically, good news about news.
The demise of local newspapers has been a depressing story in recent years, with several thousand of them gobbled up by Wall Street profiteers. Those monied powers loot the publications’ assets, then callously shut down each community’s paper or reduce them to empty shells.
So that’s that; local print journalism is passé, right?
Wrong! High-spirited, community-minded subscribers in places like Glen Rose, Texas, Hamburg, Iowa, Portland, Maine, and International Falls, Minnesota, are humming an upbeat tune of regeneration that could be titled “Not Dead Yet!”
In Maine, for example, five of the state’s daily newspapers and seventeen weeklies were sinking under the ownership of one investment group. But all were recently bought by the National Trust for Local News, a nonprofit started two years ago to pioneer a “new way for local communities to conserve, transform, and sustain their sources of news.”
The trust is turning each publication over to local nonprofit owners and helping them find ways to become sustainable.
In another effort, CherryRoad Media has bought seventy-seven rural papers in seventeen states over the last three years, most of them formerly owned by the predatory Gannett conglomerate that wanted to dump them. CherryRoad’s business plan is simple, old-time genius: return editorial decision-making to local people and journalists who know the town; be an active presence and participant in community affairs; make the locals responsible for sustaining their town’s paper; and most importantly, reinvest profits in real local journalism that advances democracy.
In both of these new initiatives, the foremost objective is to serve the common good of the communities, not to pad the wealth of a few distant financiers.