Killer whales in the wild: A sound-and-slide show from Haro Strait | Crooks and Liars: "Killer whales in the wild: A sound-and-slide show from Haro Strait
By David Neiwert Sunday Jun 27, 2010 4:00pm"
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6 years ago
ROBERT C. KOEHLER FOR BUZZFLASH
You couldn’t call it a dialogue. It was more like a momentary rip in the global power continuum, a spill of outrage on the stage of a major oil conference in London.
On Tuesday, two Greenpeace activists interrupted a speech by British Petroleum chief of staff Steve Westwell — sandwiched him at his podium, trespassed on time and space that didn’t belong to them, and spoke to an audience that hadn’t come to hear them. They had about 20 seconds, not much time to talk about the complexity of ecosystems or draw attention, say, to the plight of the Gulf of Mexico’s Sargassum algae. They did the best they could.
One unfurled a banner that read “Go Beyond Petroleum.” The other, as she was being ushered off the stage and out of the hotel, shouted, “We need to speed up progress and make a push to end the oil age.”
That was it. Time’s up. That’s how protest is — shouted and emotional, sometimes illegal. Even when it’s videotaped and the world gets to witness those 20 seconds of public theater, all we hear are slogans, all we see are disruption and scuffle: disorder, quickly dealt with. Money gets its hair mussed a little, then returns to its agenda. Nothing seems to change. The disorder implicit in that agenda returns to “let our children worry about it” status, and we remain on the track described by Ronald Wright in A Short History of Progress, his investigation into why civilizations collapse:“The concentration of power at the top of large-scale societies gives the elite a vested interest in the status quo; they continue to prosper in darkening times long after the environment and general populace begin to suffer.”
As though still on the podium with the BP exec, I claim a little more time to open up that Greenpeace slogan, to address its implications not in the abstract but in the presence of those who profit from our stagnation within the oil age, whatever that might mean. After all, it’s their future too.
For it to matter whether or not we move “beyond petroleum,” there has to be a spiritual, not just a technical, dimension to the concept. It implies, I think, a fundamental break with the domination impulse by which we have “tamed” nature over the millennia of recorded history and built our unstable civilizations, propped up by war and conquest. Moving beyond petroleum means moving beyond our uncritical acceptance of a fragmented world and fragmented sense of responsibility.
Indeed, it means moving beyond the gospel that competing fragments, each looking out for its own “self-interest” (a.k.a., capitalism), is the highest form of order we can hope for. Rep. Joe Barton of Texas, the highest-ranking Republican on the House energy committee, demonstrated the sham nature of this system last week, when heapologized to BP for the $20 billion escrow account President Obama ordered the company to establish, calling it a “shakedown.”
Turns out, A) “Of the five Gulf Coast states, Mr. Barton’s Texas is the only one whose beaches, fisheries and tourist haunts are not threatened by oil spewing from BP’s ruined well,” the New York Times reported; and B) “. . . the oil and gas industry have been Mr. Barton’s biggest source of campaign money . . . contributing $1.4 million since the 1990 election cycle,” the Times added.
At the very least, capitalism in its unregulated, most virulent form — fragmentation capitalism, you might say — which was set loose in the Reagan era, has to be contained. No small task. U.S. District Judge Martin Feldman, a Reagan appointee (with stockholder interest in the drilling industry), recently overturned Obama’s six-month moratorium on new deepwater drilling in the Gulf (which would affect operations at 33 of 3,600 sites), siding with the argument that one blown deepwater well is “no proof” the others constitute a threat — no matter that the consequences of another accident would be cataclysmic.
The decision is proof of the status-quo aversion to long-range thinking — or thinking that goes “beyond petroleum,” thinking that muddies the profit game with ethical, moral and ecological concerns.
The “no proof” argument has long been the dodge of last resort for polluters, whether corporate or governmental. For instance, the U.S. Department of Defense — the biggest polluter on the planet and supreme enforcer of the global status quo — maintained, as long as possible, that there was no proof the mystery illnesses Vietnam vets (not to mention the Vietnamese themselves) were suffering had anything to do with Agent Orange. Ditto, Gulf War Syndrome. Irrefutable proof takes decades to accumulate; in fragmentation capitalism, the aim of the game is to take advantage of this and avoid responsibility for as long as possible.
Beyond petroleum, beyond the short-sighted exploitation and fragmentation of the planet, there is life itself, awaiting our discovery in its ever-unfolding complexity. Beyond petroleum lies the human future, at peace with itself, at peace with the planet, secure in its context and evolving toward whatever comes after us.
We have to start growing up. This won’t be easy, of course. Getting there will require a concerted, planetary effort, and the ascendance of values – reverence, humility, love – bigger than the ones that drive the age of oil.
Robert Koehler is an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist and nationally syndicated writer. You can respond to this column at koehlercw@gmail.com or visit his Web site at commonwonders.com.)
Posted on BuzzFlash with permission of the author.
US Social Forum: We Will Build a New World from the Ashes of the Old
Settling into the conference. We get up late but I manage to catch most of a morning workshop led by an environmental network of youth—so sweet to sit in a circle with all these beautiful young people, again, so very diverse, and hear them make connections between the social justice issues and the environmental issues. Lots of great little moments—I run into Jim Haber, an old buddy from San Francisco who now lives in Las Vegas doing interfaith organizing around the Nevada Test Site and peace and justice issues. He’s asking me if any of the folks in the Bayview are interested in making the connection between the funding cuts for social issues and the war—when a black woman of about my age who is sitting at a table taps us and points at her button, which says “A million a day”.
“That’s why I can’t get a job,” she says. “We’re spending a million a day on those wars.” She goes on to talk about the oil spill, tells me how her heart was wrenched by those pictures of the oil-drenched pelican. This is why it’s hard for me to get anywhere on time—there are so many great side conversations.
I run into Shea Howell who works with the Boggs Center and Margo Adair, my old friend from Tools for Change in Seattle. Margo, her partner Bill and I will be working together on our upcoming Earth Activist Training in Bellingham, which will have a special focus on social permaculture. We go out to lunch with a few others at the Cass Café, way up on Cass Street—another local business which has excellent food. Rich Feldman, from the interfaith committee, has hooked me up with a projector for our workshop—and between him and Shea, they also hook me up with a ride to go get the projector, the computer, and all the other pieces.
We show our video of the permaculture work in the Bayview—which you can see for yourself at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bdKgBt6LbE
All the technology works perfectly—which was the only part really worrying me. Lena talks about Hunters Point Family, the agency she started when she was only twenty three. When I was twenty-three I was travelling around on a bicycle mooning about the drug-addict boyfriend I’d just broken up with and trying to Find Myself. She created a program for girls, Girls 2000, to help be a safe haven from the violence around them, to build their skills and self-esteem and to provide the resources that might be lacking in their homes. Lena is an impressive speaker—she’s honest and passionate and people respond to her sense of vision, the same vision that drew me in to help support their work with the gardens. Then Jasmine talks—and she is awesome, too! She has such an engaging, confident, radiant personality—she tells us about coming up in the program herself and now being a Case Manager for the girls. She runs the Girls Group and she’s young enough to be kind of a big sister to them, and she genuinely loves them.
I talk about our Earth Activist Trainings and how we came to be involved in the Bayview. One part of EAT’s mission statement is “To bring the knowledge and resources of regenerative ecological design to communities with the greatest needs and fewest resources.“ When a friend introduced me to Lena, and I heard her vision of the Bayview becoming the ‘green jewel in the crown of the Emerald City”, I knew we could support that work. We talk about what has worked well in our collaboration—a strong, shared vision is the beginning. Respecting the community—coming in with questions, listening rather than slapping down ready-made solutions, employing that permaculture principle of thoughtful and protracted observation—all that is key. And most of all, something that has come clear to us through our late-night conversations as we’ve talked about the workshop, keeping the goal firmly on capacity building for the community, on transferring knowledge and skills even when sometimes that means sacrificing efficiency or immediate results.
Then we open it up to questions and discussion. Aresh, who started Homes with Gardens in the Bronx is there and talks about some of the legal issues in New York and their efforts to defend community gardens. Shea talks about some of the Detroit Summer gardens and offers to take us to see them. A young woman who is organizing against mountain-top removal coal mining asks some thoughtful questions. All and all—a great time!
The evening, like everything, is double-scheduled. I catch some of the plenary, to hear Grace Boggs, an amazing organizer now in her nineties. She and her husband, Jimmie Boggs, who is now dead, have been the center of much of the creative and transformative work here for decades. She and other great organizers from Detroit talk about the movement history of the city. The point they make, over and over again, is that Detroit is a strong center of resistance and resilience. With all that’s happened to the city, Grace says, “we continue to come back with something new.”
I walk over to the Doubletree to meet up with Lena at the Green for All reception, hosted by Alli Starr and Ash who do great work in inner city Oakland. I run into some other old friends—like Gerardo who took our social permaculture course a couple of years ago, and is running a program for inner-city Latino and black youth which mixes arts and rites of passage and cultural identity. David Korten, the writer who has written A New Economic Agenda, The Great Turning, and When Corporations Rule the World. He’s talking with a young man from Zimbabwe who is involved in democratic, sustainable development.
When we get chased out, finally, I end up back at the plenary sitting next to Jim Haber. We decide to go out to the Anchor Bar to hear David Rovics and Anne Feeney, and walk out in the rain. The bar is crowded and noisy, but I decide to have a beer—mostly out of fear that my bad ears, which make me want to avoid noise, and my tendency to fall asleep if I imbibe even the smallest amount of alcohol, together are turning me rapidly into an old fuddy-duddy who never does anything fun. So, warding off fuddy-duddyness with beer in hand, we squeeze into the back room. Up front a man with a guitar is singing a country-rock version of Solidarity Forever and everyone is standing and singing. Someone grabs my hand and holds it up—Dave whom I met on the Gaza Freedom March. We’re all singing together, the whole crowded room, crammed with old comrades I’ve marched with so many times and with so many people I’ve never met but who have nonetheless been marching together, whether we knew it or not. We’re singing that old song that raises the ghosts of so many marches and strikes and struggles, and I’m happy. “We will build a new world from the ashes of the old,” we sing, “Solidarity forever.” I believe it.