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Raise A Little Hell
 It has been estimated that crowds of more than 25 - 50,000 people lined the streets in Quebec City to protest The Summit of The Americas. They were greeted by police who literally kidnapped people off the street and used excessive amounts of tear gas to quiet those speaking out about free trade and the destruction of our environment.
The leaders were meeting to discuss The Free Trade Area of Americas (FTAA), an international business deal that would create the world's largest free market zone. The big question in my mind about The Summit of The Americas and the FTAA is: Why is free trade and the economy taking precendence over the state of the environment? Instead of meeting to talk about the economy, why aren't our politicians concerned that the ozone layer is still depleting, that the climate is warming up at an alarming rate and that pollution levels continue to rise? The events occuring in Quebec City have caused me to start re-reading a book that scared the hell out of me when I first read it 5 or 6 years ago: It's A Matter of Survival. Written by Dr. David Suzuki and Anne Gordon, the authors warn that we have just one decade in which to avert the environmental destruction of our planet. They estimate that by the year 2040, millions of people will be wandering around the planet, having been displaced from their homes by droughts and flooding, as the Earth's climate relentlessly warms.  "We think we no longer need nature. We create economic and religious worldviews that put man's enterprise at the center of the universe and layer it with sacred truths that we know now are neither sacred nor true. But the point may be that nature does not need us. There are those who mourn our loss of nature, a loss of the natural beauty we see around us, but the real loss may go unmourned - the real loss may be us. Nature will survive; humanity runs the risk of being written out of the picture...If our leaders among government, industry and workers really see that it's a matter of life and death, a matter of survival, then they will have to act. If the very stuff that we need to breathe, drink and eat hangs in the balance, can we continue to say that economic growth, profit, material goods or even political power are the bottom line?"
Despite the protests, leaders from The Americas signed the agreement and the new free trade zone will take effect by the end of 2005. World leaders, including U.S. President George "Dubya" Bush, hope it will help curb poverty. Demonstrators believe it will do just the opposite. According to the website, stop the FTAA, http://www.stopftaa.org/: • The FTAA allows corporations to bypass democratically adopted environmental or worker protection laws, increasing corporate power while endangering the lives of millions of people, disproportionately affecting women and people of color. • The FTAA threatens to commodify our lives by turning over the control of our schools, electricity, water, and food to corporations whose only interest is more profit. • The FTAA is being negotiated in secret. Initiated in 1994 by the 34 countries of North and South America (excluding Cuba), governments have included the business sector in FTAA talks every step of the way, but have kept the text of the treaty secret from regular people and their elected representatives. 50 members of the US House of Representatives have written to the Bush administration demanding that the text be released.  As scary as the images of tear gas, fences being toppled and people rioting may look on television (and, as usual, the television media are completely sensationalizing everything) it's nice to see that Canadians are not as apathetic as everyone thinks. Sure, there were protestors there from all over the world, but there had to have been a helluva lot of Canadians there too.
If protests like this continue around the world, maybe the people can take back the planet, before it's too late.
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