The 2006 You Didn't Hear About

The big news is usually the bad news, and this year the biggest stories weren't even news -- climate change and the war in Iraq were trouble that had begun well before 2006. But dozens of small stories set another tone -- the tone of that graffiti in Seattle during the shutdown of the World Trade Organization there in 1999: "We are winning" -- not the same as "we have won" and can stop; "we are winning" is a call to action. Activists won dozens of small and not-so-small victories for human rights and the environment in 2006. The fabric of the world is woven out of small gestures; the large ones mostly just rend it and leave more to mend. And the small gestures continue. Here are some of them.

On December 31, 2005, Black Mesa Coal shut down its mine on indigenous land in Arizona because that mine fed all its coal -- as water-depleting slurry pumped 300 miles across the desert -- to the Mojave Power Station that cranked out obscene quantities of particulate matter, sulfur dioxide, and all manner of other nasty things during the decades of its operation. The mainstream media played it as a jobs story; the alternative media mostly missed what had a decade earlier been a big environmental cause.

In February indigenous leaders, forest activists and logging companies reached a historic deal that protected five million acres outright and limited logging on another 10 million acres of the Great Bear Wilderness in north-coast British Columbia. That's an area more than twice the size of Yellowstone National Park wholly preserved with another four or so Yellowstones protected -- and not just set aside as national parks are, but put under the joint jurisdiction of the First Nations people from the region and of the provincial government.

Indigenous peoples won victories all over the world in 2006, perhaps beginning with the inauguration of labor leader Evo Morales as president of Bolivia on January 22nd, the first indigenous president of the largely indigenous nation since the Spanish invasion almost five centuries before. He made good on his campaign promises to nationalize energy resources and negotiated contracts giving the impoverished nation far higher percentages of profits from natural-gas extraction. In November, the Achuar people of the Peru-Ecuador rainforest blockaded a major oil producer and forced it and the Peruvian government to implement environmental reforms.

Similarly, on July 20th, the Nigerian courts ordered Shell Corporation to pay $1.5 billion to the Ijaw people of the Niger Delta, who had been fighting the oil company for compensation for environmental devastation since 2000. In December, in Botswana, the San people -- sometimes called the Bushmen -- won the court case over their eviction from their homeland. The decision restored their right to live, hunt, and travel on their ancestral lands.

While the Navajo still fight an attempt to site a new power plant on their reservation, there were other victories against the environmental destructiveness of energy production when Congress banned all new oil, gas, and mineral drilling leases on the Rocky Mountain Front region of Montana, one portion of the west chewed up by the Bush-era extraction stampede.

There were domestic victories on other fronts. One major U.S. citizen achievement was the October defeat of attempts to privatize and jack up usage fees on the Internet, despite $200 million in corporate spending on the issue. A new grassroots movement defeated the telecom industry's attempt to take over this major new zone of global communication for its own profit. A minor but sweet victory for independent thinking and bold opposition was Stephen Colbert's April dressing down of the Bush Administration, to the president's face, at the White House Press Corps dinner. The mainstream media, also excoriated by the bold Colbert, ignored the spectacular verbal attack until the alternative media made the story impossible to ignore. Such trajectories -- major stories investigated, exposed and explained by the alternative media until the mainstream can no longer ignore the news -- are one of the reasons why net neutrality matters.