by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Feb 25, 2012 | Education, Movement Building & Support
By Dave Cooper / Huffington Post
While combating dirty fossil-fuel energy sources like coal and shale gas, activists can sometimes find themselves so intensely focused on one issue that they lose track of important developments in other related fossil fuel campaigns.
Mountain Justice Spring Break (MJSB), March 21-28 in northern West Virginia, seeks to build bridges between the long-established anti-mountaintop removal (MTR) campaign in Appalachia and the fast-growing anti-fracking campaign.
College students and young people on their spring breaks from Ohio, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, West Virginia, Tennessee, Virginia, New York and other states will attend MJSB for a week of trainings, skill-sharings, workshops, documentary films, speakers from the mountains and the hollows — learning about Appalachian music and culture through bluegrass, folk and old-time music in the evenings. A special emphasis at MJSB is connecting activists in the anti-MTR campaign with the “Fracktivists” in the anti-fracking campaign.
Mountain Justice Spring Break will offer site tours to see mountaintop removal and fracking sites in Wetzel County, West Virginia, plus tours of a coal slurry impoundment and a strip mine near Morgantown, West Virginia.
MJSB participants will also hear from citizens who live close to coal-burning power plants with air pollution and ground water contamination from multiple large power plants and large coal ash impoundments.
Other MJSB workshops will focus on anti-oppression, community grassroots and campus organizing, listening projects, coal slurry impoundments, non-violent direct action, tree-sits, media skills, fundraising, citizen air monitoring, and coal ash.
The MJSB camp location in northern West Virginia is surrounded by drilling sites for oil and natural gas, and large fracking equipment and tanker trucks constantly thunder up and down the main highway.
The dual focus of MJSB 2012 is significant, because while natural gas drilling is booming in places like northern West Virginia, coal continues to decline as a source for America’s electricity: According to the US government’s Energy Information Authority (EIA), from 2007 to 2011 coal declined from 49% to 43% as a share of the nation’s electricity supply. The EIA projects that coal will continue to decline over the next 25 years to 39%.
Yet the Sierra Club’s Bruce Nilles, Senior Director of the club’s Beyond Coal campaign, calls these numbers conservative and predicts that the percentage of electricity supplied by coal will fall even farther. “For many years the EIA has exaggerated coal’s prospects for the future, and every year has had to downgrade its projections,” said Nilles. “We know coal’s future is even darker than EIA is predicting.” For example, in 2010 the EIA predicted it would take 25 years for coal to drop to 44% of the electricity supply — it actually took only two years.
The EIA attributes this decline in coal to “slow growth in electricity demand, continued competition from natural gas and renewable plants, and the need to comply with new environmental regulations.”
While the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign has been very successful in opposing new coal plants and helping shut down dirty, older power plants, the club formerly referred to natural gas as a “bridge fuel” — a transitional source of energy until more renewable sources of energy come on line.
A Feb. 2 story in Time magazine’s Eccocentric blog points out that the club had in the past accepted donations from the natural gas industry and notes that “mainstream environmental groups have struggled to find the right line on shale natural gas and the hydraulic fracturing or fracking process.” Since 2010, the Sierra Club has refused any further donations from the natural gas industry, even turning down a promised $30 million donation, but the issue has caused concern among club members in states where fracking is underway. The Sierra Club no longer uses the term “bridge fuel,” and in 2010 launched a Natural Gas Reform priority campaign.
Environmental groups combating fossil fuels are facing titanic energy industries and a congress that is deeply indebted to them for big campaign contributions. There are many difficult choices and difficult decisions. No one has all the answers, but building stronger bridges between the campaigns against coal and fracking — as Mountain Justice Spring Break seeks to do — seems like a good start.
From Huffington Post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dave-cooper/mountaintop-removal-and-f_b_1299580.html
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Feb 25, 2012 | Indigenous Autonomy, Mining & Drilling
By William Booth, The Washington Post
REAL DE CATORCE, Mexico — For the Huichol Indians, the desert mountains here are sacred, a cosmic portal with major mojo, where shamans collect the peyote that fuels the waking dreams that hold the universe together.
For a Canadian mining company, these same hills look like a billion dollars worth of buried silver.
In a stark collision of cultures, the famously mystical Huichol are trying to stop a $100 million, 15-year mining project from starting this year.Their struggle comes as indigenous people from Alaska to the Amazon are rallying to protect not just their environment but also their cultures from decay.This raises a tough question: How do you protect a cosmic portal?“For them the whole mountain is a temple, and the gold and silver below the ground are there for a reason — they contribute to the energy, and it would be best if they just left it alone,” said Eduardo Guzman, an activist and spokesman for the Huichol living in a hard-scrabble pueblo called Las Margaritas at the foot of the magic mountain.Past Guzman’s ranch gate, a minivan loaded with Huichol, dressed in embroidered muslin tunics and straw hats dancing with colored balls and feather totems, bounced by on their way to a ceremony. The elders said they were too busy to talk and departed in a cloud of dust.
The Huichol had come from their village 150 miles away to hunt peyote — the hallucinogenic cactus they call “the blue deer.” The Huichol eat the peyote cactus raw or dried, producing auditory and visual hallucinations — pleasant or not — and sensations of introspection and deep insight.
“For the Huichol, peyote serves as the central sacrament of their rituals,” said Paul Liffman, an anthropologist at the Colegio de Michoacan, who has studied the group for years. It is not a party drug. “It is taken to illuminate the user, to light them from inside.”
As the permits are sought for the silver mine, and other threats mount in the area (another outfit seeking gold, a hothouse tomato industry nearby), Liffman said, “I have never seen the Huichol this scared. In their view, this is an existential threat.”
The Huichol, who might number 50,000, are poor but proud. They may be subsistence farmers eking out a living growing beans and corn, but they believe that their rituals to honor the deities and their ancestors — and their protection of a sacred geography of springs, hills and beaches — are necessary to preserve the integrity of the entire universe.
“They’re not exactly given to modesty,” Liffman said.
Wary of outsiders, living in inaccessible villages far away, they are allying themselves with a loose confederation of hippies and anthropologists, Mexican activists and horticultural tourists who have made the former ghost town of Real de Catorce into a kind of New Age energy hub of their own, where an ersatz Apache from Italy might take a couple of visiting seekers into the desert to hunt some recreational blue deer for themselves.
Read more from The Washington Post: http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/cosmic-portal-threatened-by-silver-mine/2012/02/04/gIQA7iB0BR_story_1.html
Update on this story: “Mexican court suspends mining in sacred territory of the Wixarika“
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Feb 25, 2012 | Male Supremacy, Worker Exploitation
By Gail Dines
I usually like watching Meryl Streep, but I seriously hope that she doesn’t win an Oscar on Sunday for her portrayal of Margaret Thatcher. I couldn’t stand the thought of more people going to see such a dreadful piece of right-wing propaganda. I actually paid money to see The Iron Lady, a new film that is ostensibly about the life of Thatcher (nicknamed “the milk snatcher” for ending free school milk). All I could think about during the torturous 100 minutes, was what great timing this film is for the Republicans. Just as they try to sell neoliberal ideology to an increasingly impoverished working class, here comes a movie that celebrates one of their most ardent proponents. From the reviews, I expected a sanitized version of Thatcher’s hideously destructive policies, but this was so sanitized that you would have thought that this poor, misunderstood woman was in fact the best thing that ever happened to Britain since Marmite.
The film is mainly focused on the last few years where Thatcher’s increasing dementia makes her a kinder and gentler neoliberal. This was a clever ploy by the filmmakers since it would have been difficult to generate any empathy for Thatcher had it centered on her glory days of dismantling Britain’s welfare state. In place of the mean spirited, vicious shill of the elite that she was, we get a doddering old woman who has heart-warming conversations with deceased Denis. In flashbacks, she is depicted as the only Tory “man” enough to destroy the money-grabbing unions.
When we do get a glimpse, and mind you it is just a glimpse, of the hell she put the country through – from the miners’ strike to the Falkland’s war – the next scenes show her being celebrated, because tough as she was, and however bitter the medicine, we are assured that her policies delivered Britain from socialist decay to prosperity. When the filmmakers show her critics, it is either hapless Michael Foot frothing at the mouth, or angry strikers screaming in her face as poor Maggie looks on pained and scared. The working class is reduced to a band of nameless thugs who are busy burning buildings, and too stupid to understand how her draconian cuts will, in the long run, save them. To be fair, there are scenes of police brutality, but these are overwhelmed by images of Thatcher shuffling around in her slippers talking to Denis.
One of the more interesting themes in the film is the idea that Thatcher saw herself as a trailblazer for women. Much has been written about her dislike of feminism, and the fact that women and children suffered disproportionally from her policies, and that during her time in office, she appointed just one woman to her cabinet. Of course, few feminists want to own Thatcher as a kindred sister, but in a way, Thatcher should be seen as an example of what happens when feminism adopts Thatcherism.
In a bizarre way, Thatcher’s “feminism” was prescient in that today’s popular feminism, with its celebration of individual empowerment and personal choices, indeed makes Thatcher a Third Wave feminist success story. The movie celebrates her tough decisions, and her obstinate agency, whatever the consequences. Similarly, today’s feminism-lite is all about the elite women who get to enjoy the goodies that capitalism hands out to a few of us, devoid of any political understanding of how economic, political and legal institutions operate to limit the life chances of poor white women and women of color. These elite women run the mainstream blogs, journals and publishing houses, and it is their experiences that become normalized and celebrated as feminism.
That these women may be working in institutions that reproduce gender, class and racial inequality, and hence are now part of the problem, is ignored, and those who do point this out are smacked down for denying women “agency.” Equally problematic is the inability of elite feminists to understand that, just because they themselves have class and race privileges, this does not change the conditions of life for most women on the planet. Developing theory from the experiences of the most privileged individuals makes for a feminist movement that is popular with the boys, but irrelevant to most women. Thatcher famously said that there is no such thing as society; no structure, no collectivity, only individuals. She was wrong, but how awful that much of what passes for feminism today has embraced such an idea.
GAIL DINES is a professor of sociology and women’s studies at Wheelock College in Boston. Her latest book is Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked our Sexuality (Beacon Press)
From Counterpunch: http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/02/24/the-feminism-of-maggie-thatcher/
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Feb 24, 2012 | Mining & Drilling, Toxification
By Kevin Begos, Associated Press
A western Pennsylvania woman says state environmental officials refused to do follow-up tests after their lab reported her drinking water contained chemicals that could be from nearby gas drilling.
At least 10 households in the rural Woodlands community, about 30 miles north of Pittsburgh, have complained that recent drilling impacted their water in different ways.
The Department of Environmental Protection first suggested that Janet McIntyre’s well water contained low levels of only one chemical, toluene. But a review of the DEP tests by The Associated Press found four other volatile organic compounds in her water that can be associated with gas drilling.
DEP spokesman Kevin Sunday said on Friday that the low chemical concentrations were not a health risk, and suggested that the contamination may have come from the agency’s laboratory itself or from abandoned vehicles on or near the property. But Sunday didn’t answer why DEP failed to do follow-up tests if the DEP suspected that its own lab was contaminated.
One public health expert said the lack of follow-up tests by DEP doesn’t make sense.
“DEP cannot just simply walk away,” said Dr. Bernard Goldstein, professor emeritus at the University of Pittsburgh School of Public Health.
McIntyre and other residents say the water problems started about a year ago, after Rex Energy Corp. of State College, Pa., drilled two wells. But a map Rex provided also shows gas wells from other companies in the area.
Residents in the community have been complaining for nearly a year, but DEP never revealed the possible presence of chemicals to the general public.
Read more from Physorg: http://www.physorg.com/news/2012-02-pa-chemicals-drilling-area.html
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Feb 24, 2012 | Indigenous Autonomy, Obstruction & Occupation
By Ahni, Intercontinental Cry
A Nyoongar Tent Embassy was established on Perth’s Heirisson Island this month in response to a Billion dollar proposal by the Western Australia government that would force the Nyoongar to surrender their land title, permanently.
For elders like Uncle Richard Wilkes, surrendering his custodianship of land is unthinkable, as the proposed deal, he says, won’t provide all the supposed benefits that the government promises.
Many of those involved in the Embassy are local Indigenous activists who just finished commemorating the 40th anniversary of the iconic Aboriginal Tent Embassy in front of the Old Parliament House in Canberra.
Prominent Indigenous organizer Marianne Mackay said from the embassy last week: “We don’t agree with the SWALSC negotiations with the Barnett government. We don’t want money. We want our land, for our future. We are the custodians [of the land] and we have an obligation to protect it.”
The embassy is rejecting any kind of deal with the government that involves ceding land rights.
“Elders, activists and local Nyoongar people have camped at the site every night” since February 12, explains Green Left Weekly; “The island is an important traditional meeting place.”
The City of Perth, however, considers the Nyoongar Tent Embassy to be illegal. On at least three separate occasions they have tried to shut it down.
On February 16, some council officers arrived with eviction notices; but they quickly left after being told that they weren’t welcome. The following day, City of Perth CEO Frank Edwards approached the Embassy on his own–and then tossed the eviction notices on the ground.
Speaking to AAP, Tent Embassy spokesperson Robert Eggington responded: “My message to the Perth City Council is move on yourself… This is not a camping ground. This is us practising our culture and our ceremonies on our traditional land of our ancestors.”
Eggington added that the police had no right to take the Tent Embassy down. “They’ll probably have to arrest the babies and the elders,” he said. “They’ll probably have to arrest every single person.”
“The jails are already chock-a-block full of Aboriginal people, so where are they going to fit us all?”
On February 19, more than 50 police officers arrived to carry out the eviction, leading to a false impression that the Tent Embassy was officially a thing of the past; however, as the Green Left Weekly noted two days later, that just wasn’t the case.
On February 23, the police arrived once again–this time, with a group of rangers to do the dirty work.
“When the protesters refused to dismantle their tents,” reports Adelaide Now, “rangers moved in to take them down as dozens of police officers stood by to prevent them being hindered.”
“The tents were packed onto a flat-bed truck and as it was driven off under police escort. Protesters chanted “shame, shame” and accused officers of being racist.
“An angry confrontation occurred when rangers next moved in to extinguish the main campfire as 30 police officers stood around them.
“Protesters jostled with police and shouted abuse as the rangers finished their job.
“Officers on horseback then moved in to escort the rangers and officers from the site.”
Despite the dismissal of the Nyoongar Tent Embassy, the Nyoongar have no intention of giving up.
From Intercontinental Cry: http://intercontinentalcry.org/australia-nyoongar-people-reject-billion-dollar-native-title-deal/
