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GAIA wishes everyone a happy and safe end of 2011. It has been a year of remarkable struggles and successes in our collective efforts to challenge waste and pollution, and to promote healthy, sustainable solutions. We're pleased to share some of the most recent successes—including victories in Brazil and the United States, and zero waste events in Italy. We're also pleased to profile Alliance for a Clean Environment (ACE) in Western Australia, and share their recent victories.
By the Land Reseach and Action Network
In "Birthing Justice: Women Creating Economic and Social Alternatives," 12 women from movements around the world invite us into their lives, sharing their vision of what the world can and must become, and showing us what they and their community are doing to build that world. From Idla Martines de Souza organizing with the Landless Workers Movement in Brazil, to Emem Okon building peace in middle of a resource war in Nigeria, to Juana Ferrer and Via Campesina turning towards food sovereignty to end gender violence, each of these women have important wisdom and vision to share with us all.
As organizations return home and recover from the mobilizations at the recent climate talks, it's hard not to see the meeting as a loss for developing nations, indigenous peoples, and planet Earth. Civil society organizations got their first sense that the meeting was not going to address real solutions to climate change when the negotiating document for the conference was released at the end of November. After the Copenhagen talks ended last year, many grassroots organizations felt that their voices had been excluded from the negotiations. In response, they organized a 
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The United Nations voted Weds. to declare that access to water and sanitation is a fundamental human right. Forty countries abstained from voting, including the US, Canada, and most of Western Europe. This historic vote represents another barrier preventing companies and governments from treating water as a product that can be bought and sold, rather than a part of the commons, to which all humans have shared rights and responsibilities.
The US rust belt has become ground zero for a movement to re-imagine our cities and economies. Exciting new initiatives around worker co-ops, public land, green jobs, urban agriculture, and alternative economic development are being started every day in cities that have long been written off as lost causes. But Cleveland, Toledo, Detroit, Rochester, and Flint are also the site of growing conflict between competing visions of what the future of these cities should look like.
After years of struggle, protest, and advocacy, indigenous communities in Guatemala and their allies around the world have succeeded in closing the Marlin gold mine in San Miguel Ixtahuacán, Guatemala. The mine, operated by the Canadian firm Goldcorp, has polluted rivers, destroyed sacred mountains, poisoned the people who live around it, and divided their communities. In response, the communities impacted by the mine protested, organized popular consultations to demonstrate their opposition to mining, and filed complaints with international agencies.