 |
  |
 |
||||||||||
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
||||||||||
|
TALES FROM THE PIELC Realistic
Anarchy Robin Terranova, the local editor of Green Anarchy magazine, rails against "civilization itself." Industrialization, domestication and agriculture have created a system of "enslavement" and alienation that is destroying humans and the planet, he says. Too many on the left are "coming from the assumption that mass society is something that's good, that's sustainable, that's healthy, and it's not." A woman in the audience at the Public Interest Environmental Law Conference (PIELC) last week raises her hand. "Do we need to give up everything?" she asks. What about guitar string and glasses. "I want to see. I don't want to die young."
Local anarchist author John Zerzan smiles from his seat next to Terranova on the panel. He touches his glasses, "I'd certainly be lost without these," he admits. But he says people need to think more deeply about the labor and environmental costs that go into such technological items. "It's certainly not a simple thing." Anarchists are too often stereotyped as "mad bombers" or "cave people," Terranova says. "I'm not proposing that tomorrow we destroy civilization and live as hunter gatherers," says Terranova. "It's not very realistic." But he says people should examine the costs of the way they live. Terranova faults most environmentalists for failing to question technology. "We see the left as a failure," he says. "We actually question the left as much as we question the right." Technology creates "alienation" and "domination," he says. He gives the example of a gun made from minerals destructively mined from the earth and manufactured by workers dominated by their bosses. The gun allows people to easily kill at a long distance without "getting blood on their hands," he says. "The gun analogy can be drawn all the way to nuclear weapons." Terranova advocates for "economic sabotage" targeting those "profiting off the earth." He praises the Earth Liberation Front for destroying "millions and millions of dollars" worth of SUVs, logging equipment, and luxury homes under construction. "More extreme action needs to be taken," Terranova says. He calls for "harassment" and "property damage" against individuals responsible for oppression, such as corporate executives of companies involved in animal experiments. Zerzan faults most environmentalists for "plodding along" and "not ever getting radical and getting down to what this is really about." He notes a recent article in The Nation magazine supportive of globalization. "Globalization is the virulent matastizing form of civilization," Zerzan says. Much of environmental rhetoric is "ridiculous," he says. "Sustainable this and that, there's nothing sustainable about the system." He faults "the whole world system of cancer," noting, "there's no mother's milk that doesn't contain dioxin." Rigor Sue, of Cascadia Forrest Defenders and Cascadia Rising, says from the panel that there's many people like herself that don't call themselves anarchists but are still "fully in line with these same thoughts." "As we see more and more environmental laws taken away, we are going to see more people involved in direct action," Sue says. She says activists need to guard against burn out and despair. "When you're talking about destroying civilization, the list of what you want to do becomes very long," she says. "Unfortunately, there haven't been a lot of victories." Another danger she says is male domination within the environmental movement itself. "We saved a tree, but we're still being the same authoritarian assholes when it comes down to it." Another woman raises her hand. She describes herself as a long-time environmentalists sympathetic to many anarchist arguments, but says she can't understand actions like blowing up a power line tower. Such destruction makes enemies, causes environmental damage and is quickly repaired, she notes. The civil rights and anti-Vietnam war movements had success with a non-violent approach that didn't alienate potential supporters, she says. "As long as your staying with the nonviolent tradition, you're hope for converting the opposition is so much better." Sue says the question of property destruction comes up frequently. She says the movement has enough room for people to take different approaches. "We can all work together on multiple levels." A younger woman with nose rings stands up, "This is a discussion I've heard eight million fucking times," she says. "Blah, blah, blah, blah fucking blah," she says, calling for less debate on the issue and more action. Radicals in social movements play a crucial role, she says. Whites compromised with Martin Luther King Jr. rather than face the alternative of the Black Panthers, she says. "It makes you look so much more reasonable when you're sitting next to something that is smashing everything."
A man in the audience says he works for GI rights and was in Seattle at the big 1999 WTO protests in Seattle in which the mainstream media blamed anarchists for violence. "The most violence I saw was from the police violence," he says. "It's already the state that starts it. That starts beating people's heads in and then it accelerates." A young man with long hair and beard, asks, "If I'm enslaved and I break the chains that bind me, isn't that property destruction?" Another audience member asks how the world could move to anarchist primitivism "without a huge loss of human life." Zerzan says the world is already suffering massive species die-offs under the current system. "Nobody has the answers of how fast that [anarchist move] can happen or exactly how," he says, but society needs to face the need for a big break from the current system. Terranova says technological civilization's "artificial life support system" is already severely damaging the planet with the current population. How many should the artificial system keep alive, he asks, 10 billion, 20 billion? "Keeping this artificial life support system going is certain death for all the other species and probably our own," Terranova says. "We're in a tough spot no matter what." But it's unclear how much of the anarchist rhetoric is reality. After the panel, one of the more radical-sounding people in the audience could be heard trying to take a call on her cell phone. "Hello? Hello?" she said, frustrated at the poor reception. "Damn!"
Vetoing
Vinyl The first thing many of us do when we slide behind the wheel of a new car is take a deep breath. Ahh, that "new car smell." But according to the Oregon Toxics Alliance, we might be huffing more than a pleasant aroma. The scent is actually the smell of toxic off-gassing from carcinogenic "plasticizers" used in the manufacture of vinyl. David Monk and Margie Kelly from the OTA along with UO Biology professor Joe Thornton, spoke about the dangers of vinyl and the OTA's Vinyl Out of Oregon Campaign (VOO) on Sunday. Vinyl, or PVC, is currently produced in large amounts and used in countless products across the globe. It is most often found in homes (approximately 75 percent of all PVC manufactured is used in building materials), hospitals, toys and food packaging. Fourteen billion pounds of vinyl were produced in North America alone last year. "This is no longer a local problem, but now a ubiquitous problem that effects the health of the entire human population," Thornton says. He explains that vinyl, both in its production and use, is one of the most hazardous consumer materials on the market, mainly because huge amounts of chlorine are used in its production. During the industrial processes — creating the plastic or disposing of it by incineration — a dangerous, cancer-causing by-product known as dioxin is formed. Dioxins can cause both air and ground-water pollution. By-products are globally distributed on currents of wind and water, and significant levels of toxins are found in animals and tree bark in remote parts of the world, far from the source of the pollutants. "Very small amounts of these chemicals released in the environment can end up being a very significant problem for animals high up on the food chain," Thornton says. "Plasticizers" also break down and are released from their products during normal use. Thornton cited vinyl toys for infants as one of the cases where this might happen, causing damage to the brain, liver and kidneys. Kelly says the VOO Campaign is working to shift the market to reduce demand for vinyl building materials in favor of safer alternatives. "We don't need to discuss whether vinyl should be phased out," she says. "It's a matter of when." One of the ways OTA attempts to do this is by reaching key decision-makers (designers and builders) during a building's conceptual phase. "Many of them have never looked at vinyl as a problematic material," Monk says. OTA works with UO students, the Healthy Building Network, the Center for Health, Environment and Justice, as well as other organizations to get the word out. It provides research, resources ideas for design specifications, and also launches media campaigns with the goal of phasing out vinyl. Monk is optimistic. "It's not going to happen tomorrow, but I've had some really promising conversations," he says. "When consumer demand increases, suppliers will start supplying and promoting the alternatives." Many large companies such as Nike, Sony and Mattel are taking action to phase out vinyl from their products, and some cities have passed or proposed resolutions to address public health concerns regarding vinyl. Eugene city planners and firefighters have teamed up to design vinyl-free buildings. Monk says it is imperative that we take further steps to reduce the use of vinyl in all products. "In my opinion, there is no question that vinyl is a bad product and arguably the worst consumer product on the planet," he says. To find out more about the OTA and VOO, visit
Chainsaw
Massacre
On Sept. 11, 2001, Greenpeace had planned to announce its list of the 10 most endangered forests in the world. The terrorist attacks changed all that. As the nation's attention focused on Osama, George Bush was left to serve the timber industry as the "worst environmental president" in the nation's history, says Andrew George of the National Forest Protection Alliance at the Public Interest Environmental Law Conference at the UO last week. The post 9/11 logging push by Bush left environmentalists in despair, says Mike Roselle of Greenpeace at a panel discussion on endangered forests. "I'd never seen a more dejected group of people," he says. "Things looked really bad." But as in the past, the movement is bouncing back with the excitement of unseating Bush in November. This year is "one of the most important in my memory" to the environmental cause, Roselle says. "We can lay old-growth clearcuts on his doorstep." With both houses of Congress and the presidency pro logging, "the triple Republican government is completely siding with the timber industry," George says. "We're left with getting down in the trenches and fighting timber sale by timber sale." But George says the heavy handed logging will backfire. Bush has "united the entire environmental movement" to fight the kind of grassroots battle that is its strength. Chosen high profile anti-logging campaigns in places like Oregon, Alaska, Idaho and even the east rim of the Grand Canyon will help convince "the great greenwashed middle" to vote against Bush, George says. "We're going to do a little political jujitsu." The forest battle has become a national issue, reaching all the way to the hillbillies in southwest Virginia, says JR Moore of the Clinch Coalition in a southern drawl. Heavy logging on national forests has caused violent flooding in his area that has wiped out communities, left one man dead in a slide, and choked trout lakes and streams with sediment, Moore says. The Clinch Coalition boasts 5,000 members, has local Congressmen on it's side and recently helped unseat a pro-timber industry county commission. "We are super strong, and we are not going to give up," Moore says of the battle to save the area's forested highlands for the next generation. He quotes one 72-year-old woman active in the rural group, "Leave the High Knob the hell alone!" Lesley Adams of the Klamath Siskiyou Wildlands Center is fighting the largest timber sale in modern U.S. history, the half billion-board-foot Biscuit fire sale. She says the Bush administration has tried to portray the sale as fire salvage, but in reality the fire burned in a mosaic and much of the sale is green old growth. Fire is an important part of local ecology, clearing brush and allowing trees to seed. Some pine cones need fire heat to open, Adams notes. More than 20,000 people wrote in to oppose the Biscuit sale, but protesting the logging on the ground is difficult because it's far away from major cities, Adams says. "It makes it really hard to organize masses of people when we don't have masses of people living there." But a June rendezvous camp is already scheduled and environmentalists are trying to get more people into the beautiful woods on tours to see what's at stake. "One of the best things you can do for a forest is have people fall in love with it," Adams says. Roselle says there is some "suspicion" among environmentalists that the Bush administration may have laid a political ambush for environmentalists over the fire salvage logging issue. But even so, Roselle says environmentalists have to take the bait. "By God, we've got to win on fire because we're going to have fires every damn year." Adams says forest activists have already begun scouting tree sits for the Biscuit sale and other logging sales that threaten pristine roadless areas in the southern Oregon region. "We're going to dig in and fight like hell to save it." Will the Bush administration use the Patriot Act to fight back? So far they haven't, says Roselle. The government has targeted Greenpeace with an IRS investigation and with an "unprecedented" criminal case that threatens to forbid the group from direct action, he says. But activists should test and push the USA PATRIOT Act and not be intimidated, he says. "We've found we can have the same kind of direct actions we've always had," Roselle says, although that may change this summer. Roselle, wearing a "Forest Crimes Unit" T-shirt, says Greenpeace isn't doing civil disobedience. It's the loggers that are breaking the law, he says. "We are insisting our laws be upheld." Moore says the Forest Service does appear tense post 9/11. At a recent picket at a Virginia Forest Service office, one activist went inside to use the bathroom, according to Moore. A Forest Service ranger, suspecting a bomb plot, kicked down the door with his pistol drawn, catching the young man with his pants down, but no bomb. |
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
 |
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||
