Missed Opportunities

Movement Monday 9/5/22

Hi, all.

A couple of stories to highlight this week:

In Chile, voters rejected a new constitution 62% to 38%. The proposed update to the constitution, which progressive lawmakers in Chile had been working on for two years, would have made strides on a variety of fronts, including allowing for the creation of autonomous Indigenous territories within Chile, recognizing the right to water, free education, housing, and health care, and prioritizing the protection of the environment, not only as “public common goods,” but with the structure of recognizing the rights of nature. With significant text devoted to describing the climate crisis and how to address it, the new constitution would have represented a big step forward in confronting the climate crisis at this scale.

It is believed that disinformation campaigns played a considerable role in voters’ decisions, as “viral images circulated on WhatsApp falsely claiming the proposal would erase private healthcare and education and criminalize the consumption of meat.” Others reported that many citizens felt as though the progressive majority in the constitutional convention wrote the constitution for themselves and not the country as a whole, leading to concerns that the proposals in the new constitution were too extreme amongst even center-left voters. For now, Chileans are stuck with the constitution from the Pinochet military dictatorship from 1980, though the current president, Gabriel Boric, says he would like to restart the process to try to draft another constitution. 

For more on what could have been, read this Inside Climate News article, A New Constitution in Chile Would Provide Groundbreaking Protections for the Rights of Nature, if Voters Approve It. 

Another going-on to highlight is the drinking water crisis in Jackson, Mississippi. It’s a striking example of how climate-change-linked weather patterns will and already are exacerbating existing problems and disproportionately affecting low-income and BIPOC communities. NPR reported “The current crisis began… when days of torrential rain caused the Pearl River, which runs through Jackson, to swell and then crest around 35 feet high… Yet even before last week's rains, concerns over Jackson's water system were well-documented, and the city was already under a state-issued boil water notice in the month leading up to the flooding.” 

The Mississippi Free Press has extensive coverage of the flooding, its historical context, the layers of injustice that coat this acute crisis, and the wide-ranging impacts it is having on citizens, like having kids revert to virtual schooling again. Please read more from the Mississippi Free Press here. 

(A darkly ironic twist is that as there were efforts in Chile to deprivatize the water supply in the drafted constitution, the Republican governor of Mississippi Tate Reeves is considering the privatization of the water supply as a solution to the current crisis if the City of Jackson can’t get its act together…)

To learn more about what you can do to help residents of Jackson right now, read this, but also check out the work of Dig Deep, which is doing really inspiring work to bring clean water to communities currently without access across the USA.

The vote in Chile to reject the new constitution is a huge missed opportunity, and the crisis in Mississippi represents a series of missed opportunities where interventions could have been made to prevent the current situation. While these lost opportunities are disappointing at best and tragic to those experiencing the consequences first hand, we can hope that new opportunities will be seized to improve the lives of Chileans and Mississippians, and do our best to create new opportunities for positive change in our own communities.

Thanks for reading!