PHOTO/GLOBAL JUSTICE ECOLOGY PROJECT
Over 300 grassroots, frontline and Indigenous Peoples from North America attended the The Resurgence: 2019 North American Forest & Climate Movement Convergence held October 11-14 in the Shawnee National Forest.
This was not a conference but rather a convergence with self-organized strategic action sessions. The sessions were not dominated by talking heads or top down proposals. People discussed and made future plans for radical action in the age of the climate emergency and growing international fascism. Reform was not on the agenda.
The convergence included people working on the interconnected issues of forest destruction, climate change, Indigenous sovereignty, racial and gender oppression, corporate domination, fossil fuel extraction, and social and environmental injustice to help build a powerful movement—a movement to radically transform economic and political systems that drive planetary and human destruction.
Global Justice Ecology Project’s Orin Langelle said, “The Convergence was a tremendous success. People networked, talked, and listened to each other respectfully as plans and strategies emerged.”
Langelle added, “We must be ready to resist and not fall for neoliberal false solutions that aid the elites. Resistance to all neoliberal policies, like the people are doing in Chile, is necessary on a global scale.”
Organizers wanted the convergence to be in the Shawnee National Forest to showcase a tremendous victory and to remember history. In 1990 Earth First! occuppied a timber sale area for 79 days. The major daily newspaper in Springfield, IL, the state’s capital, called the occupation “a popular uprising.” This served as a catalyst leading to an almost twenty-year halt in logging.
Video and interviews from the event can be seen here: vimeo.com/channels/1509643convergence
