Indigenous Peoples Summit Anchorage - Wednesday 2

Actually, this is from Tuesday night's film festival. Here is a taste of the second Australian film they should where people from the film then addressed the audience. They talked about how the rising ocean tides were going further inland and the salt water was killing the plants and fouling the fresh water there. This was eating into the habitat of traditional plants and animals use for food and medicine.

After watching about ten of these short films I was struck by a couple of things:

1. How similar the stories were. The weather changes affecting the environment where indigenous people live, threatening their ability to continue their own way of life. In the case of Carderets Islands, the sea water is literally destroying all arable land on the island forcing them to leave because there was nothing left to eat except fish and coconuts.

2. There was also concern about international corporations - timber, mining, energy particularly - reaching into their environment and adversely affecting the life in that environment on which they depend.

3. In some cases problems with other people - including indigenous peoples - who had been induced to 'sell' natural resources - animals they shot for food, timber to multinational companies, etc. And so their own neighbors were causing problems.

4. A high level of historic awareness of their natural environment which enables them to document changes that otherwise would go unnoticed.

A skeptic might argue the similarities are due to the film makers who have packaged these stories from different locations to all tell the same story. Certainly this plays probably a minor role and that is inevitable. But my experiences in Thailand last year and this was replete with similar stories that I wasn't packaging. This is a universal phenomenon. And those who still believe that global warming is a myth concocted by liberals, or that it is just a natural swing like the earth has experienced forever, well, there's a link on the right for global warming skeptics.

I'm sitting out in the lobby while people are meeting closed off to media. I'm not sure I mentioned that I got in here as press, covering this on my blog. I assumed that an organization that is made up of 'marginalized people' would be inclusive for marginalized media types. And I was right. So I'm taking advantage of the time to catch up a bit and I'm waiting for the video to upload to viddler so I can embed it here. OK, it's done. This is not great video, but it gives you a sense of things.

Indigenous Peoples Global Summit on Climate Change (click link for all the posts on the summit)

Indigenous Peoples Summit Anchorage - Wednesday 1

I had a dental cleaning appointment this morning so I'm just getting to the summit this afternoon. People are reporting on their group work.

Speaker now:
"I've never before encountered a group characterized with so much honesty, righteous indignation, and a lot of commitment and determination. People shared their dreams, willingness to go to jail if necessary...I was moved... most poignant changes that have taken place in history have taken place in jail...Martin Luther King....Nelson Mandela..."

Larry Merculief just spoke with real emotion about how powerful his group prior this current speaker.

Theme Four - Energy Security



Summary of what we discussed so far. How have people been affected by traditional development in our territory.
Dams that have devasted and displaced communities
Oil development - including tar sands - displacing.
Bio fuels - devasting to some of our communities, people displaced for planting.
Nuclear power - continues to devastate people, not only in production, but extraction.
Clean coal - no such thing, no way to make it clean

In addtion to these projects being negative, also addressed carbon trading.

I'm not going to try to catch the recommendations because they are still tentative and I'm sure I won't capture them accurately. But this should give you an idea of what is going on. You can also check the podcasts which are live for many of the sessions.

Now they are going to break into regional caucuses. This is all leading up to a declaration the Summit wants to agree on by Friday.








Indigenous Peoples Global Summit on Climate Change (click link for all the posts on the summit)

Seward Highway Road Closure this Weekend!

[UPDATE, Tuesday noon: The road work was NOT completed at 5am Monday as scheduled. People were told it could be 5pm or later. The following is now up on the State site, saying the road is now open:

Open To Traffic - Seward Highway

Seward Highway: at Falls Creek Bridge road open to traffic, short delays -- look out for flaggers last updated today [Tuesday, April 28] at 11:18 AM]

One of the visitors to the Indigenous Peoples Summit told me last night he wanted to go to Seward Saturday before he left for home. Wanted to see a bit of Alaska. But the tour agency said the road was closed. After I thought about that a while, I thought, "They can't close the road all day. They can't shut the people of Seward off from the world like that." So today I emailed a friend in Seward to check. After that I thought, "Why didn't you just google?" (Cause it was an excuse to say hi to my friend probably.) So I googled and got this:

Alert - Seward Highway

Seward Highway: from Milepost 22 to Falls Creek Bridge delays, lane closed due to road construction work — until May 30 Comment: PLEASE NOTE: ROAD CLOSURE - The Seward Highway will be closed at Milepost 24.8 - Falls Creek this coming Friday, April 24th at 10:00 PM until Monday, April 27th at 5:00 AM. All construction is scheduled to be completed by Saturday, May 30th. For more information you may contact either DOT at 907-269-0450 or Tal Maxwell, the project engineer, at 907-632-2729 or the contractor at 907-288-6700.. Thank you. last updated yesterday at 4:29 PM

Read that. What does that mean to you? I see "delays, lane closed..." But then it says "will be closed at Milepost 24.8...Friday...until Monday."

Then I got this back from my friend in Seward:

Crazy as it sounds, DOT is actually closing the road on Friday at 10 pm and not re-opening it until Monday morning at 5 am. It is unbelievable. They have three bridges that need major work, and the intent is to place temporary bridges on two of them. Sadly, DOT did not include the community in planning for the closure, so it took us all by surprise. We found out about 4 weeks ago and have been scrambling to address the issue. Lots of businesses have had to cancel bookings which had been booked a year or more in advance.

OK, I know there were some serious bridge problems, and making an extra lane over water in the narrow canyon could be tricky. And I'm sure they can get more work done if they don't have to let cars go by every hour or less. It's a trade off and probably it would cost a lot more to pick an option that lets people use the road. Or maybe it would cost a lot more in terms of imagination and creativity - how about a ferry on the lake? When I was on a bus in Nepal in another lifetime, we came to a huge rock slide. We were simply told to climb over the rocks and there was the bus coming the other way. The passengers just traded buses which gingerly turned around on the narrow mountain road. Isn't there a railroad bridge there? Why not work with the railroad for some extra trains that day, or at least a shuttle car over the railroad bridge. People could arrange to swap cars or there could be shuttle busses. There are lots of options if we put our heads together. It could even be fun. But cutting off a town of about 3000 plus everyone else that lives south of Moose Pass for a whole weekend seems pretty extreme.

Indigenous Peoples Summit Anchorage - Tuesday 2 PV Films

I've got a lot of video, but my computer is also full and I still don't trust my external hard drive, but I've been trashing old video so I can download new stuff. It's much easier to just write.

This evening I went back to the Denaina Center for the Summits film festival. I'm not sure what I expected, but I was really excited when I left. Basically, the films were all short films - up to about four or five minutes - made by the people in the films. There are some helpers. The UN has a whole program to help indigenous peoples make PVs (participatory videos) as a powerful way to tell their own stories. Two people who help people make such films - Citt (pronounced Kitt) Williams and Nick Lunch - were there to give some background. There were also some people who were in the films. (Nick's link goes to a video of Nick and his brother talking about making PVs.)

For this conference, the them was climate change, and most of the films showed us how climate change was affecting the lives of the people in the film. Films we saw covered a wide variety of locations:
Inuit Canada
Carterets Island - these people are being forced to move to the Papua New Guinea mainland by rising tides which is destroying their crops. The one hundred twenty families on the island are all preparing to leave their homes. Here's the video itself from Citt's blog on the site Media Studio. It's from her post yesterday from Anchorage.



Masai in Kenya - Drought is killing their livestock - you can see this film at Conversations with the Earth. Click on the video tab and the Masai.
Madagascar - drought is causing dunes to take over arable land. They are fighting back planting in the sand.
Borneo - A village where each family has ten plots. Each year they plant on one of those plots on a ten year rotation. They also protect the forests around them, while neighboring villages have had their forests cut by timber companies.
Camaroon - Looking at the loss of forest and the impacts that has on their culture. This film was their first film and made just last week!
Australia - Discusses the problems of fires.
Madagascar - Here an older woman teaches a younger woman about sorghum.
Peru - This film was different from the others. It is a more traditional documentary with a God-like narrator discussing how the glaciers are melting and other issues.
Australia - Two more Australian ones. People from both these films were in the audience and spoke to the group. Below is a bit of video I took of the first one and the woman from that movie. I'll try to add another one with the other guys who were here after the movie. But I'll do that later.



This was really good stuff. I realized that this is what I was starting to do in Thailand. But I was thinking that the videos were not really my job, just something I was doing on the side. But clearly next time I could focus on the sort of work that produced these videos of people telling their own stories. It was good to be able to talk to Nick and Citt afterward.

Indigenous Peoples Summit Anchorage - Tuesday

It's lunch break at the Denaina Center in Anchorage. I got here at the tail end of the morning sessions of the Indigenous Peoples Summit. This shot of the lobby shows a bit of the crowd from all over the world.
While I know something about these topics on a general level, I really have no indepth knowledge of what's going on in the world of indigenous people and climate change. So once I got into the room, I just pulled out the computer and started typing as people were talking and taking pictures. What you get here is my somewhat overwhelmed glimpses at the last panel of the morning. The afternoon sessions are closed to media so that delegates feel comfortable talking to each other without fear their words will show up somewhere for the whole world to see. That's certainly reasonable.

John Crump from the UN was discussing various UN activities related to climate change. That's him under the overhead on Objectives (of the UN in regard to climate change and indigenous peoples as I understood it.) Again, you're getting bits and pieces here out of context - think of it as sticking your head into a restaurant and catching some of the smells from the kitchen.

Now the UNESCO presentation - Peter Bates - He said there's general agreement about climate change and it's unlikely we'll be able to stop it so the focus is now on adapation to climate change. (I can't emphasize enough that you shouldn't take anything I write here as the gospel. It's possible that I've totally misinterpreted what I heard.)

Indigenous people are the first people already to experience with climate change and have a history of adapting to climate change. So they will get a larger role in UNESCO.

Discussion of UNESCO activities:

• Internet Forum - French, English, and Spanish
• Field Projects - Funded by Denmark - small projects, money available, proposals can be made by anybody = calls for proposals will be at info desk. Looking for coordinator for these projects.
• Website - www.climatefrontlines.org peoples@climatefrontlines.org
• Other Activities - Monaco Meeting - Climate Change and Arctic Sustainable Development - interdisciplinary dynamic - scientists as well as indigenous peoples had good interchange and there will be continuing work

• www.unesco.org/links has the report and presentations online.
• Aug 2007, Canberra Australia Indigenous Knowledge and Changing Environments - publication coming soon and will be at the previous link.

Then we had Violet Ford, ICC (Inuit Circumpolar Council) Canada, The Convention on Biological Diversity and Climate Change

Parapharasing what I heard: Indigenous people were able to participate in this project. We were put on government delegations, where we try to influence the delegation, but are also forced to compromise. This forum has opened the door for indigenous peoples around the world to participate in BDCC process.

We hold traditional knowledge of these resources. The Convention recognizes the dependence of indigenous and local communities on biological diversities.

She discussed the relationships of various international conventions which require countries to conform with the agreements.
Decision iX/13 - alerts nations to keep the agreement. (All the pictures can be enlarged by double clicking them)

I don't know how the parties will take on the obligations to indigenous people. But the Inuits of N. Canada are already adapting - new travel and hunting routes as geese and caribou have shifted their migration routes. The significant role of indigenous people needs to be recognized by post Kyoto Convention. We can't wait though. What will happen to our traditional knowledge when we can no longer hunt, when there is no need to pass own our knowledge.

Indigenous Peoples Global Summit on Climate Change (click link for all the posts on the summit)


I'm going to stop here and post. I've got one more speaker to go, but I'm putting the video together for her - Vicky Tauli-Corpuz - and some of the questions.

Helen Louise McDowell Sanctuary

An end of the legislative session email from my representative Berta Gardner mentioned some parks in our district. But one didn't ring any bells - Helen Louise McDowell Sanctuary. We looked it up and recognized it as a park we've stumbled into a couple of times and couldn't find a couple of other times. Well, it seemed more like undeveloped property at the time, between the south side of Geneva Woods and Tudor, right up against the Seward Highway at the exit to 36th. So on the way to Yamato Ya for dinner, we rode over to find the park. We went along the St. Gotthard as we'd seen on an internet map. St. Gotthard Avenue is full of the typical Geneva Woods giant houses on disproportionately small lots. We got to the end of the street, (the red circle with the 1 on the map - modified from Google Earth and enlargeable with a double click) without seeing an entrance to a park. On our right were the pink and white houses on the bottom of the first photo above, right. On our left was the long fence below. So where's the park entrance?

Well, we looked in a hole in the fence and then saw that
there was a gate. (It's where that little beige circle is on the left)

It didn't open very wide and there weren't any signs and it all looked like private property, but once we poked our heads in we could see that this did get to the park.



Inside the gate we saw graveled area (a future parking lot?), at the end of which was the park sign in the picture below.

(As always, double click any picture to enlarge it.)

We took the trail to the right. We could have ridden our bikes from the trail right onto the Seward Highway as it adds a right lane to exit onto 36th. There's no separation except some trees.










Things started getting wet, though the trail was good until it disappeared in the snow and dead grasses.

So we rode back to the signs and took the other trail over to the view below.

A little further on we found the boardwalk we'd read about online.
It doesn't go very far yet

And ends in the mud - which was why we had turned back from the other trail. But we weren't able to see the boardwalk from there.

We ended up going out the way we came and riding
back to 36th through Geneva Woods. The view from this corner looking up a street appropriately
called Matterhorn was pretty spectacular.

On the way back from dinner we rode along Tudor and turned into Eau Claire to see if the entrance to the park on the south side was any better. The picture below is at the red circle with the 2 on the map way above.

The entrance is at the end of the street behind the dumpster.

Here's a closer view. The sign in the distance says "Municipal Park Land."
There aren't any benches yet, but there was this mattress .

The Geneva Woods side did remind me of places along the California coast like Malibu where it is very hard to find access onto the beach. Somehow, the fancy neighborhoods are good at making access to their public parks much harder than most other places. But I'm thankful that this piece of wetland got preserved and will remain relatively natural as the rest of the town gets more and more urban. And the neighborhood on the south side is pretty basic and on the map it looks like there are a couple of other access points.

And who is Helen Louise McDowell? It took a bit, but I did find the ADN obituary (you may need a password on this link I got through the UAA library) from November 24, 1999.

Longtime Anchorage resident Helen Louise Socha McDowell, 84, died Nov. 14, 1999 at Providence Alaska Medical Center in Anchorage from complications following a stroke.

No local service is planned. As she requested, her ashes will be scattered over Mount Susitna.

Mrs. McDowell was born July 2, 1915, in Glide, Ore., and arrived in Alaska in 1921. As a young girl she lived for a short while in the coal mining camps at Eska and Jonesville until her family moved to Anchorage, where she attended elementary and high school.

She has been a permanent resident of Anchorage since 1927. In 1933, she married Willie Williams of the U.S. Army Signal Corps WAMCATS, and their son was born in Anchorage at the old Railroad Hospital in 1936.

During World War II, she worked as a desk clerk at Anchorage Hotel and during the mid-1950s was co-owner of Gilman's Fountain Lunch on Fourth Avenue. Mrs. McDowell was one of the few remaining longtime residents living in downtown Anchorage, residing at her home on Sixth Avenue for the past 50 years.

Her son said: ''Helen dearly loved animals, especially dogs and an occasional cat. She enjoyed reading and playing cards and, even after being confined to a wheelchair, was a cheerful and positive inspiration to all who knew her.''

She is survived by her son, Stanley J. Williams of Anchorage, and her dear friends, Curlene Harker, Kenneth Hall and Jeanie Markley.

Family requests memorial donations may be made to Friends of Pets, P.O. Box 240981, Anchorage 99524.

Indigenous People's Global Summit on Climate Change

There's a major event happening in Anchorage this week. It's so important that even the Anchorage Daily News covered it today.

Hundreds of indigenous people from around the world are gathering in Anchorage this week to discuss climate change and solutions for a warming planet. The Indigenous Peoples' Global Summit on Climate Change, a five-day United Nations-affiliated conference, will run through Friday, with about 400 people from 80 nations expected to attend.

There's no question that modern science doesn't have all the answers and I think that humans, through genetics and through their life experiences, have different levels of risk aversion and tendencies to prefer doing things individually or in groups. These and other factors affect how they react to issues like global warming and whether they prefer collective or individual solutions. And these preferences tend to affect which facts they believe and which they are skeptical of. I have had a link for global warming skeptics on my right side bar for a long time. It addresses just about every argument skeptics raise about climate change.

There are a lot of people who ridicule the idea of global climate change (probably a better term than global warming) because they see themselves negatively impacted if Global Climate Change is more extreme than just natural fluctuations and steps to reduce carbon emissions are taken. They see deterioration of their lifestyle, deterioration of their income, and other dire consequences.

The lifestyles and cultures of indigenous peoples, as materially modest as they have been compared to modern Western lifestyles, have been threatened all over the world as the capitalist economic systems seek natural resources in the local environments of indigenous peoples whether in the Arctic or rain forests or in deserts. (I know that some people will get apoplectic seeing me use a word like 'capitalist' in that previous statement, but I'm merely stating something that I don't think anyone can dispute whether staunch capitalist or diehard socialist.) Western (and Eastern) ideas of legally owned private property are in stark contrast with collective and migratory connections to land of many indigenous peoples. Australian Aboriginal songlines most captivatingly discussed by Bruce Chatwin in his book Songlines, are an alternative way of mapping and of conceiving of how humans and land are related. I'm not saying it is a better way, but it was their way which was in conflict with how the European immigrants to Australian conceived of land.

The website for this week's conference offers a fair amount of background material. One document is a guidebook on climate change for indigenous peoples and I've copied section 12.

12 Guide on Climate Change and Indigenous Peoples

Massive floods, strong hurricanes, cyclones and typhoons and storm surges lead to the destruction of houses, infrastructure (bridges, roads, electrical lines, dams, mine-tailing ponds, etc.), forests, agricultural lands, crops, livestock, marine and coastal resources; massive land slides; loss of freshwater supplies, increase of pathogenic micro-organisms and vectors which are carriers, loss of
electricity, etc.

• These lead to human impacts such as physical isolation because of floods and massive landslides which reduce possibilities for them to market their crops, livestock, marine and coastal resources, etc.; the loss and destruction of ancestral lands, resources and homes, food insecurity and hunger (destruction of crops, destruction of coral reefs and mangroves, and spawning beds of local fish, decrease and loss of livestock, etc.); fresh water-insecurity; energy insecurity; increased prevalence and virulence of infectious diseases such as cholera, etc.
• More frequent and prolonged droughts and floods cause the disappearance of plant and animal species that have sustained indigenous peoples as subsistence food sources or as essential to their ceremonial life.
• Extreme and unprecedented cold spells and prolonged wet environment results to health problems, such as hypothermia, bronchitis and pneumonia, especially among old people and young children.
• A drop in water levels, drought, desertification and saltwater intrusion leads to more hunger and impoverishment. Water and food insecurity is exacerbated.
• Traditional livelihoods ranging from rotational agriculture, hunting and gathering, pastoralism, high montane livestock and agricultural production, coastal and marine fishing, trapping, agro-forestry livelihoods, among others, are undermined because of climate change.
• Adverse impacts on traditional livelihoods and their ecosystem will also mean loss of traditional knowledge, innovations and practices associated with these livelihoods and ecosystems.
• Loss of revenue, economic opportunities and the practice of traditional culture are expected to increase the social and cultural pressures on indigenous peoples. The outmigration of indigenous youth to seek economic opportunities elsewhere because climate change has limited further their opportunities in their own communities, could lead to erosions of indigenous economies and culture.
• Increase in a number of indigenous persons who end up as environmental refugees or who outmigrate because their lands have gone underwater or have eroded due to landslides.
• Capacities of indigenous women to perform their roles as seed-keepers, water bearers, transmitters of culture and language, among others, are undermined.
• The loss or migration of culturally important species will make it more difficult for elders to practice and pass their traditional ecological knowledge to the next generation. (from the Background page)
  

Indigenous peoples, just as people who have moved into their territory from elsewhere, include very smart and not so smart individuals; people who are well-centered and those who have serious problems. Some are well educated others haven't had that opportunity or inclination. Some contribute to their own problems, some make life better for themselves and for others. In general, their issues are everyone's issues, though the specifics may be different. They tend though, as societies, to have maintained a closer tie to their land and natural environments than have people who live in more human constructed environments. What they know about how their environments are changing is something the rest of us should pay attention to.

Digital Detox - Monday April 20

I was just thinking this morning that maybe I should have a day a week where I don't touch my computer. (If I were an orthodox Jew I'd already have this on the Sabbath.)

And then I got an email just now with this message:

Computer screens, iPods, TVs, phones and the dozens of other devices we’re cybernetically attached to are so pervasive that we can’t escape them. We live them, we breath them, we need them ... Or do we?

On Monday, April 20, Adbusters challenges you to do the unthinkable: unplug. Say good-bye to Twitter and Facebook. Turn off your TV, iPhone and Xbox. Reconnect with the natural world and the people around you. You’ll be amazed at how the magic creeps back into your life.

Go to www.adbusters.org for inspiration, articles, videos, posters and more. Next Monday, don't be afraid and don't find excuses ... take the plunge and see what happens.

Did that suggest a whole week? I think just one day would make a good start. So, I challenge you to pick one of the next seven days to just shut off everything digital (good thing I still have a turntable) and take in reality without the virtual shield.

Thanks, Jim.

Poster from this Adbuster link.

[For those of you who saw the earlier version of this with the message cut on the right, I just got rid of the box. But if someone would like to suggest a relatively easy way to adjust the code in the box to do the same thing, I'm listening.]

David Chalmers Extending Our Minds

It was standing room only at the talk by philosopher David Chalmers. In a room that sits maybe 200 people, about 15 or 20 had to stand because all the seats were full. On a Friday night. Thirty years ago you might have said that's because there's nothing to do in Anchorage, but that is definitely not true today.


Chalmers' talk at UAA reminded me of what I like and don't like about the discipline of philosophy. What I like is the imagination and creativity where a proposition is made that goes beyond how we normally think about things. A bit like science fiction. But philosophers then make careful and detailed, excruciatingly detailed arguments, to support this newly created conceit, to attack it, and to defend it. I like the conceits and the thought that goes into initially developing the logical argument to support the conceit. What gets old for me is how long they'll argue over things that seem irrelevant to anything that matters. But then I'm sure that people who accidentally get to this blog often react the same way to what they read here.



In any case, the conceit that Chalmers and his colleague Andy Clark created about ten years ago (in a paper called The Extended Mind)is the idea that something outside your skin - like your i-phone or like an Alzheimer's patient's notebook where he keeps track of things he needs to remember. I'm using 'he' because in his example, Otto is the Alzheimer's patient who is compared to a 'normal' human named Inge who performs the same functions (the notes in the notebook) in her mind.

Chalmers challenged us to think outside the skin and it was an interesting exercise. He argued that objects can act as mind extenders if they had several characteristics. Sort of like the way a cane helps aid in the act of walking, a calculator or a notebook, can aid the act of thinking. And when it does, it becomes part of the mind. Or put another way, the mind expands outside the skin to include the notebook.

The video gives a snippet of the talk. This is not the most important point, but it was a time when he walked over to our side of the room and there weren't so many heads in the way.



It was good to see so many people out for a philosophy talk. No, our governor was not there. But others were and they stayed around to ask questions afterward.

What's Consciousness?

[UPDATE:  See post of his presentation here]

[photo from Chalmers' website]
We may or may not find out tonight (Friday April 17) at UAA when Australian philosopher David J. Chalmers talks at the

UAA/APU Consortium Library Room 307.
7 pm.

My daughter, a philosphy major at UW, says "He's big!"

Here's a bit from on

Publish Post

e of his papers:

Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness
David J. Chalmers
Philosophy Program
Research School of Social Sciences
Australian National University

1 Introduction
Consciousness poses the most baffling problems in the science of the mind. There is nothing that we know more intimately than conscious experience, but there is nothing that is harder to explain. All sorts of mental phenomena have yielded to scientific investigation in recent years, but consciousness has stubbornly resisted. Many have tried to explain it, but the explanations always seem to fall short of the target. Some have been led to suppose that the problem is intractable, and that no good explanation can be given. To make progress on the problem of consciousness, we have to confront it directly. In this paper, I first isolate the truly hard part of the problem, separating it from more tractable parts and giving an account of why it is so difficult to explain.