Commentary

A Labor Perspective on COP 15

by David Foster, Executive Director, Blue Green Alliance

Copenhagen, COP 15, was my fourth United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change conference and provided quite a contrast from COP 11 in Montreal in 2005. That year I was the only representative of U.S. labor with an interest in supporting the UN process. By comparison, in 2009, the seven Blue Green Alliance union partners sent 28 representatives, including two national presidents, Terry O'Sullivan from the Laborers' International Union of North America, and Mike Langford of the Utility Workers Union of America. The rest of the delegation included ranking officers and high-level staff of the United Steelworkers, Service Employees International Union, American Federation of Teachers, Communications Workers of America, and Amalgamated Transit Union.

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Building a Better World, One Step At A Time

By Phillip Henderson

Some years ago, I picked up the book The Reluctant Metropolis, by William Fulton. Fulton describes in this very engaging history the way politics and power dynamics shaped the modern era of the Los Angeles megalopolis. I grew up just down the road from downtown LA, in what was once the fruit trees and farmland of Orange County. I had often read about how metropolitan LA had sprung up over the course of the twentieth century. But as a person who arrived as a youth in the late 1970s, LA had always seemed a fully formed place, traffic, pollution, movie stars and all. What Fulton's book made me realize for the first time was that LA, and in a larger sense the world, was being shaped right under my nose. In fact, LA hadn't been the static, fully formed place that I'd experienced in my youth. Many of the key factors that embody the current version of LA, from water policies, to demography, to tax and education policy, were slowly and imperceptibly (to me) being shaped and developed during that time.

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