Tammy, Lian and I attended the World Social Forum as members of the Grassroots Global Justice Alliance delegation. Since returning, I've been grappling with the renewed question of how can we organize better and more creatively, so that we can be a stronger partner with the rest of the world in our united front to save the planet.

The March

The World Social Forum officially opened with a march. In the heat, in the pouring rain, it was confusion, excitement, celebration, thousands of people packed together in the street. People of all ages danced to the rhythms of the bantucada players (Brazilian street drum corps) while other groups such as the Indigenous delegations from the Andes and the Amazon marched waving the rainbow colored Wiphala flags. After the rain stopped, our delegation joined up with the Global March of Women, an international anti-capitalist women's organization whose fierce coordinated drumming, chanting, and coordinated running exposed us to another form of creative and militant marching culture to bring home to the BRU Drum and Chant Crew.

The Indigenous Struggle

This year's social forum strategically took place in the mouth of the Amazon with a deliberate focus on the Indigenous and Quilolombas (Afro-descent) peoples' struggle in the Amazon against the extraction of their resources and the destruction of their land by global capitalist development. A vast delegation of over 1300 Afro and Indigenous peoples' from all parts of the Amazonian states (Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Peru, Suriname and Venezuela ) and from other continents made their presence felt throughout the WSF.

I was part of the Global Well Being working group along with Timmy Lu from Asian Pacific Environmental Network (APEN) and Tom Goldtooth from Indigenous Environmental Network (IEN) and much of the next few days we trekked across the two large university campuses where the social forum was taking place, to attend some of the hundreds of presentation and events on Climate Justice, Environmental Justice and Indigenous People's Rights.

One of the IEN sponsored presentations we attended had Indigenous leaders from Guatemala, Brazil, and the Alliance of Indigenous Organizations of the Amazon Basin (COICA) as well as members of the Climate Justice Now! coalition talking about the struggle against UN Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation in Developing Countries (REDD). This program is the latest UN and World Bank sponsored false solution to the ecological crisis. REDD is really a plan to take forests away from Indigenous people and local subsistence communities and convert their forests into carbon-storing reserves for rich countries like the US. One of the presenters observed that after the housing crash in the US, many investment firms like Morgan Stanley are aggressively moving into carbon offset markets and that this has led to a renewed conquest against Indigenous people to take their lands for carbon plantation projects.

What really enraged me, though, was hearing that many US mainstream environmental groups were at the WSF to pressure Indigenous groups to join REDD and give up their land for monetary incentives-an almost impossible choice for many underresourced communities. Indigenous people already have to struggle against the repression and violence of corporations and local state governments that deny their rights to the land. But now they must also constantly fight the "conservation" NGOs in the US and Europe who claim they are fighting climate change to stop the planetary ecological crisis!

It was an important lesson for me personally. To witness how the racist and imperialist mentality of these NGOs blinded them from seeing Indigenous people and their lands as as anything more than just another ready commodity to use to reinvent themselves as "green." It made me grasp more deeply that Indigenous peoples' struggles must be at the center of our work for us to have any hope of stopping the ecological crisis. I am humbled by the struggle waged by Indigenous peoples in the Amazon to protect one of the last remaining forests that is critical to our survival and the well-being of our planet. As the Amazon is threatened by schemes like REDD, it will become a key battleground that must be protected.

For those of us working in US-based environmental justice movements, who can relate firsthand to Indigenous peoples' struggles against racism and empire, our role is, more than ever, to stay the rapacious hands of the US, to expose and stop these market-based ecological false solutions from being projected into the Third World.