by DGR News Service | Apr 6, 2025 | ACTION, The Problem: Civilization, The Solution: Resistance, Toxification
Editor’s note: “Most people don’t realize that part of gas extraction is a liquid condensate, the origin of plastics, which is being pumped, defying Climate Chaos, via the maze of fracking pipelines to the Gulf Coast, where the US is set on cornering the world plastics market, as well as shipping the LNG gas it has forced on its European vassals.” In a bid to become a world plastics monopoly, Exxon quietly plans to erect a new $8.6 billion plastics plant. The proposal calls for a steam cracker, a facility that uses oil and natural gas to make ethylene and propylene — the chemical building blocks of plastic. “Besides ethylene and propylene, steam crackers produce climate pollution and hazardous chemicals like ammonia, benzene, toluene, and methanol.”
“Where Exxon is going to put their bloody plant is smack-dab in front of [what will be] one of the largest oyster farms in Texas,” said Wilson, who is not convinced that any plastics factory can operate without polluting. She noted that Formosa has already violated its settlement agreement nearly 800 times, racking up over $25 million in fines. “Exxon is going to be exactly like Formosa.”
“We have been cleaning the piss out of [Cox Creek], and this is the very place where Exxon is going to try to put its plastics plant,” Wilson, who lives in nearby Seadrift, said of the facility’s potential location. “You see this nightmare of another plant, trying to do the very same thing.”
A Shrimper’s Crusade Pays Big Dividends on a Remote Stretch of Texas Coastline
Five years after Diane Wilson’s landmark settlement with Formosa Plastics, money flows to “the bay and the fishermen.”
By Dylan Baddour
December 24, 2024
This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here.
PORT LAVACA, Texas—Few men still fish for a living on the Gulf Coast of Texas. The work is hard and pay is meager. In the hearts of rundown seaside towns, dilapidated harbors barely recall the communities that thrived here generations ago.
But at the docks of Port Lavaca, one group of humble fishermen just got a staggering $20 million to bring back their timeless way of life. They’re buying out the buyer of their catch, starting the largest oyster farm in Texas and dreaming big for the first time in a long time.
“We have a lot of hope,” said Jose Lozano, 46, who docks his oyster boats in Port Lavaca. “Things will get better.”
It’s all thanks to one elder fisherwoman’s longshot crusade against the petrochemical behemoth across the bay, and her historic settlement in 2019. Diane Wilson, a fourth-generation shrimper from the tiny town of Seadrift, took on a $250 billion Taiwanese chemical company, Formosa Plastics Corp., and won a $50 million trust fund, the largest sum ever awarded in a civil suit under the Clean Water Act.
Now, five years later, that money is beginning to flow into some major development projects on this mostly rural and generally overlooked stretch of Texas coastline. Through the largest of them, the Matagorda Bay Fishing Cooperative, formed in February this year, Wilson dreams of rebuilding this community’s relationship with the sea and reviving a lifestyle that flourished here before global markets cratered the seafood industry and local economies shifted to giant chemical plants.
“I refuse to believe it’s a thing of the past,” said Wilson, 76, who lives in a converted barn, down a dirt road, amid a scraggle of mossy oak trees. “We’re going to put money for the fishermen. They’re not going to be destroyed.”
The fishing cooperative has only just begun to spend its $20 million, Wilson said. It’s the largest of dozens of projects funded by her settlement agreement. Others include a marine science summer camp at the Port Lavaca YMCA, a global campaign to document plastic pollution from chemical plants, a $500,000 study of mercury pollution in Lavaca Bay and the $10 million development of a local freshwater lake for public access.
“They are doing some wonderful things,” said Gary Reese, a Calhoun County commissioner. He also received grants from the fund to build a pier and a playground pavilion at other county parks.
The fund resulted from a lawsuit Wilson filed in 2017 under the Clean Water Act, which enables citizens to petition for enforcement of environmental law where state regulators have failed to act. By gathering evidence from her kayak over years, Wilson demonstrated that Formosa had routinely discharged large amounts of plastic pellets into local waterways for decades, violating language in its permits.
These sorts of lawsuits typically result in settlements with companies that fund development projects, said Josh Kratka, managing attorney at the National Environmental Law Center in Boston. But seldom do they come anywhere close to the dollar amount involved in Wilson’s $50 million settlement with Formosa.
“It’s a real outlier in that aspect,” Kratka said.
For example, he said, environmental organizations in Texas sued a Shell oil refinery in Deer Park and won a $5.8 million settlement in 2008 that funded an upgrade of a local district’s school bus fleet and solar panels on local government buildings. In 2009 groups sued a Chevron Phillips chemical plant in Baytown and won a $2 million settlement in 2009 that funded an environmental health clinic for underserved communities.
One reason for the scale of Wilson’s winning, Kratka said, was an unprecedented citizen effort to gather plastic pollution from the bays as evidence in court. While violations of permit limits are typically proven through company self-reporting, Wilson mobilized a small team of volunteers.
“This was done by everyday people in this community, that’s what built the case,” said Erin Gaines, an attorney who previously worked on the case for Texas RioGrande Legal Aid. “This had never been done before, but that doesn’t mean it can’t happen.”
Wilson’s settlement included much more than the initial $50 million payment. Formosa also agreed to clean up its own legacy plastic pollution and has so far spent $32 million doing so, according to case records. And the company committed to discharge no more plastic material from its Point Comfort complex—a standard which had never been applied to any plastics plants across the nation.
“They cannot believe I would do this for the bay and the fishermen. It’s my home and I completely refuse to give it to that company to ruin.”
Formosa consented to regular wastewater testing to verify compliance, and to penalties for violations. Now, three times a week, a specially engineered contraption analyzes the outflows at Formosa. Three times a week, it finds they are full of plastic. And three times a week, Formosa pays a $65,000 penalty into Wilson’s trust fund.
It’s small change for a company that makes about a billion dollars per year at its Point Comfort complex, or $2.7 million per day. To date, those penalty payments have totaled more than $24 million, in addition to the $50 million awarded in 2019.
The money doesn’t belong to Wilson, who has never been rich, and she never touches it. It goes into a fund called the Matagorda Bay Mitigation Trust, which is independently managed.
For the first $50 million, Wilson evaluated grant applications and allocated the money to government entities, registered nonprofits and public universities. Now an independent panel administers the fund.
Many locals who know her story assume that Wilson is rich now, she said. But she never got a penny of the settlement. She was never doing this for the money.
“They cannot believe I would do this for the bay and the fishermen,” she said. “It’s my home and I completely refuse to give it to that company to ruin.”
Formosa also writes grants for community development programs, although none of them approach the size of the Matagorda Bay Mitigation Trust.
In response to a query from Inside Climate News, the company provided a summary of its community spending over 30 years, including $2.4 million on local and regional environmental projects, $2 million for a new Memorial Medical clinic, $2 million to upgrade local water treatment systems, $2 million to an area food bank, $1.3 million for local religious organizations and $1.2 million on scholarships for high school seniors.
The company has contributed $6.3 million for regional roadway improvements, donated 19 houses to the Calhoun County Independent School District and built a classroom in restored wetlands. Its annual employee golf tournament raises $500,000 for United Way charities, and its national headquarters in New Jersey gives $1 million each year to local charities. In Point Comfort it has programs to plant trees, protect bees and restore monarch butterfly habitat.
“Formosa Plastics has always believed in giving back to the community and approximately 30 years ago established education, environmental, medical, religious and scholarship trusts,” the company said in a five-page statement.
Since the 2019 settlement, Formosa has taken steps to address environmental challenges and reduce the environmental impact at its Point Comfort complex, the company said.
Formosa has installed pollution control systems to reduce the release of plastic particles, has partnered with industry experts to develop better filtration methods and is monitoring emerging technologies for opportunities to improve environmental stewardship, it said. The Point Comfort complex has also improved stormwater drainage to reduce plastics in runoff, and is engaging with community advocates to identify sustainable solutions.
“We understand the importance of protecting the environment and the communities where we operate, and we remain steadfast in our commitment to transparency, accountability, and continuous improvement,” the statement said.
The Fishing Way of Life
Wilson fondly recalls the bustling fishing community of her youth in Seadrift, more than 60 years ago. There were hundreds of boats at the docks, surrounded by a town full of mechanics, welders, netmakers and fish houses.
They weren’t rich, Wilson said, but they were free. They answered to no one, except maybe game wardens. They had twilight every morning, the silence of the water, the adventure of the search, the thrill of the catch and a regular intimacy with spirits of the sea, sun, wind and sky.
“You are out there on that bay, facing the elements, making decisions,” Wilson said. “That is as close to nature as you can get.”
Over her life, she watched it all fall apart. There are no fish houses in Seadrift today. Almost all the old businesses were bulldozed or boarded up. Wilson’s own brothers took jobs at the giant petrochemical plants growing onshore. But every day off they spent back on the water.
Most people called her crazy, 30 years ago, when she started complaining about water pollution from Formosa. Powerful interests denounced her and no one defended her.
But Wilson never gave up speaking out against pollution in the bay.
“That bay is alive. She is family and I will fight for her,” Wilson said. “I think everyone else would let her be destroyed.”
Over years of persistent, rambunctious protests targeting Formosa, Wilson began to get calls from employees at the plant, asking to meet secretly in fields, pastures and beer joints to talk about what they’d seen. They told her about vast amounts of plastic dust and pellets washed down drains, and about the wastewater outfalls where it all ended up.
When Wilson started visiting those places, often only accessible by kayak, she began to find the substance for her landmark lawsuit, millions and millions of plastic pellets that filled waterways and marshes.
“Felt like Huck Finn out there, all that exploring,” she said.
In 2017, Wislon filed her petition in federal court, then continued collecting evidence for years before trial. It was the first case over plastic pellet pollution brought under the Clean Water Act, according to Amy Johnson, then a contract attorney with the nonprofit RioGrande Legal Aid and lead attorney for Wilson’s case.
Gathering Nurdles
Down the coast in Port Aransas, a researcher at the University of Texas Marine Science Institute named Jace Tunnell had just launched a project in 2018 to study water pollution from plastics manufacturing plants. At that time, little was known about the scale of releases of plastic pellets, also called nurdles, into the oceans from those industrial facilities.
The Nurdle Patrol, as Tunnell called it, was beginning on a shoestring budget to methodically collect and catalog the nurdles in hopes of getting a better picture of the problem. That’s when Tunnel, a fourth generation Gulf Coast native and a second generation marine scientist, heard about a fisherwoman who was also collecting nurdles up the coast.
He contacted Wilson, who shared her data. But Tunnell didn’t believe it. Wilson claimed to have gathered 30,000 nurdles in 10 minutes. Tunnell would typically collect up to 200 in that time. He drove out to see for himself and found, to his shock, that it was true.
“The nurdles were just pluming up back there,” Tunnell said. “It really was an eye opener for me of how bad Formosa was.”
At that time, Wilson and her small team of volunteers were pulling up huge amounts of plastic from the bay system and logging it as evidence.
In 2019, the case went to trial. At one point, she parked a pickup truck full of damp, stinky plastic outside the federal courthouse and brought the judge out to see. She also cited Nurdle Patrol’s scientific method for gathering pellets as a means to estimate overall discharges in the bay.
“Diane was able to use Nurdle Patrol data in the lawsuit to seal the deal,” Tunnell said.
Later that year, the judge ruled in Wilson’s favor, finding Formosa had violated its permit limits to discharge “trace amounts” of plastics thousands of times over decades.
Formosa opted to negotiate a settlement with Wilson rather than seek a court-ordered penalty. In December 2019, the two parties signed a consent decree outlining their agreement and creating the $50 million Matagorda Bay Mitigation Trust.
Funding Community Projects
Right away, Wilson signed over $1 million to the Nurdle Patrol, which Tunnell used over five years to build an international network with 23,000 volunteers and an online portal with the best data available on plastic nurdles in the oceans. They’ve also provided elementary and high schools with thousands of teaching kits about plastics production and water pollution.
“There’s no accountability for the industries that release this,” Tunnell said as he picked plastic pellets from the sand near his home on North Padre Island in early December. “Of course, Diane kind of changed that.”
The trust’s largest grant programs are still yet to take effect. Wilson allocated $10 million to Calhoun County to develop a 6,400 acre park around Green Lake, the second largest natural lake in Texas, currently inaccessible to the public.
The county will begin taking bids this month to build phase one of the project, which will include walking trails and birding stands, according to county commissioner Reese. Later they’ll build a parking lot and boat ramp.
The county brought this property in 2012 with hopes of making a park, but never had the money. Initially, county officials planned to build an RV park with plenty of pavement. But funding from Wilson’s trust forbade RVs and required a lighter footprint to respect the significant Native American and Civil War campsites identified on the property.
“It’ll be more of a back-to-nature thing,” Reese said. “It’s been a long time coming, we hope to be able to provide a quality facility for the public thanks to Matagorda Mitigation Trust.”
By far, the largest grant from the trust has gone to the fishermen. Wilson allocated $20 million to form a cooperative at the docks of Port Lavaca—an unlikely sum of money for seamen who struggle to feed their families well. Wilson dreamed that this money could help bring back the vanishing lifestyle that she loved.
The Fishermen
Today, most of the remaining commercial fishermen on this Gulf coast come from Mexico and have fished here for decades. It’s hard work without health insurance, retirement plans or guaranteed daily income. But it’s an ancient occupation that has always been available to enterprising people by the sea.
“It’s what we’ve done our whole life,” said Homero Muñoz, 48, a board member of the fishermen’s cooperative, who has worked the Texas coast since he was 19. “This is what we like to do.”
Lately it’s been more difficult than ever, he said. Declining vitality in the bays, widespread reef closures by Texas authorities and opposition from wealthy sportfishing organizations force the commercial fishermen to compete for shrinking oyster populations in small and distant areas. Then, the fishermen have little power to negotiate on low prices for their catch set by a few big regional buyers, who also own most of the dock space. The buyers distribute it at a markup to restaurants and markets across the county.
“There isn’t anyone who helps us,” said Cecilio Ruiz, a 58-year-old father of three who has fished the Texas coast since 1982.
To help the fishermen build a sustainable business, Wilson tapped the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, an organization based in Atlanta originally founded to help Black farmers and landowners form cooperatives in the newly de-segregated South. For FSC, it was an unprecedented offer.
“This is an amazing project, very historic,” said Terence Courtney, director of cooperative development and strategic initiatives at FSC.
Usually, money is the biggest obstacle for producers wanting to form a collectively owned business, Courtney said. He’d never seen a case where a donor put up millions of dollars to make it happen.
“Opportunities like this don’t come around often. I can’t think of another example,” Courtney said. “We saw this as something that history was compelling us to do.”
The Matagorda Bay Fishing Cooperative
In 2020 Courtney started traveling regularly to Port Lavaca, meeting groups of fishermen, assessing their needs, discussing the concept of a cooperative and studying feasibility.
The men, who speak primarily Spanish, had trouble understanding Courtney’s English at first. But they knew someone who could help: Veronica Briceño, the daughter of a late local fisherman known as Captain Ralph. As a child, she translated between English and Spanish around her father’s business and the local docks and harbors.
Briceño, a 40-year-old worker at the county tax appraisal office, was excited to hear about the effort. She’d learned to fish on her grandfather’s boat. Her father left her four boats and she couldn’t bring herself to sell them. She joined FSC as a volunteer translator for the project.
“These men, all they know how to do is really just work,” she said. “They were needing support from someone.”
A year later, FSC hired Briceño as project coordinator. They leased an old bait shop with dock space at the harbor in Port Lavaca and renovated it as an office. Then in February 2024 they officially formed the Matagorda Bay Fishing Cooperative, composed of 37 boat owners with 77 boats that employ up to 230 people.
Now Briceño has a desk at the office where she helps the fishermen with paperwork, permitting and legal questions while coordinating a growing list of contracts as the cooperative begins to spend big money.
Negotiations are underway for the cooperative to purchase a major local seafood buyer, Miller’s Seafood, along with its boats, dock space, processing operations and supply contracts for about $2 million.
“I hope they help carry it on,” said Curtis Miller, 63, the owner of Miller’s Seafood, which was founded by his uncle in the 1960s. “I would like to see them be able to succeed.”
Many of the cooperative members have worked for Miller’s Seafood during the last 40 years, he said. The company handles almost entirely oysters now and provides them wholesale to restaurants on the East Coast, Florida and in Texas.
The cooperative has also leased 60 acres of bay water from the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department to start the largest oyster farm in Texas, a relatively new practice here. FSC is now permitting the project with the Texas General Land Office and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
“That might be the future of the industry,” said Miller. “It might be the next big thing.”
“It Can Be Revived”
At a recent meeting of the cooperative, the members discussed options for a $2.5 million purchase of more than 7,000 oyster cages to install on the new farm. They talked about plans to visit and study a working oyster farm. The cooperative is finalizing a marketing and distribution plan for the farmed oysters.
The project would give two acres to each oysterman to farm, and would finally do away with the frantic race to harvest the few available oyster areas before other boats do. Now, they’ll have a place of their own.
“To have our own farms, liberty to go to our own piece of water,” said Miguel Fierros, 44, a bearded, third-generation fisherman and father of three. “It’s a unique opportunity I don’t think we’ll ever get again.”
Briceño, the project coordinator, hopes that the practice of oyster farming will bring a new generation into the seafood industry here. Neither of her kids plan to make a living on the water like her father or grandfather, who always encouraged the family to find jobs with health insurance and retirement. Now her 21-year-old son works at Formosa, like many of his peers, as a crane operator.
Perhaps this cooperative, with its miraculous $20 million endowment, can realize the dream of a local fishing industry with dignified pay and benefits. If it goes well, Briceño said, maybe her grandkids will be fishermen someday.
“We’re going to get a younger crowd actually interested,” she said.
This project is just getting started. Most of their money still remains to be spent, and the fishermen have many ideas. They would like to buy a boat repair business to service their fleet, as well as a net workshop, and to open more oyster farms.
For Wilson, now an internationally recognized environmental advocate, this all just proves how much can be accomplished by a stubborn country woman with volunteer helpers and non-profit lawyers. Ultimately, she hopes these projects will help rebuild a fishing community and bring back the fishermen’s way of life.
For now, the program is only getting started.
“It can be revived,” Wilson said. “There is a lot of money left.”
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Photo by Sören Funk on Unsplash
by DGR News Service | Dec 5, 2021 | Direct Action, Human Supremacy, Mining & Drilling, Property & Material Destruction, Repression at Home, The Problem: Civilization, The Solution: Resistance
Sentenced to eight years in prison for acts of sabotage, water protector Jessica Reznicek reflects on her faith-driven resistance.
By Cristina Yurena Zerr
This article was first published in the German newspaper taz, and has been translated and edited for Waging Nonviolence.
On June 28, the federal court in Des Moines, Iowa was silent and filled to capacity. Fifty people were there to witness the sentencing of 40-year old Jessica Reznicek, charged with “conspiracy to damage an energy production facility” and “malicious use of fire.” The prosecution, asking for an extended sentence, argued that Reznicek’s acts could be classified as domestic terrorism.
This was not the first time Reznicek had been on trial, but this time she was facing a prison sentence of up to 20 years.
Sitting across from her was U.S. District Court Judge Rebecca Goodgame Ebinger, the prosecutor and an FBI agent. Numerous police officers in bulletproof vests stood around the courtroom. The defendant was called upon to give her closing speech.
In her loud, clear voice, Reznicek told them about her strong connection to the water. In her childhood she regularly went to the river to swim and play. But that’s no longer possible, she said, because the two rivers that run through Des Moines — Iowa’s capital — are now poisoned by agrobusiness pesticides and waste.
It was for these very personal reasons that she decided to fight the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline, Reznicek told those in attendance. At least eight leaks, she explained, had already occurred in 2017, with 20,983 gallons of crude oil leeching into soils and the waterways. “I was acting out of desperation,” she said, describing her motivations for sabotage.
“Indigenous tradition teaches us that water is life. Scripture teaches that in the beginning, God created the waters and the earth and that it was good.” With these words, she ended her closing argument. The prison sentence followed shortly thereafter: eight years in federal prison, three years of probation, and a restitution of $3,198,512.70 to the corporation Energy Transfer.
The Des Moines River (Cristina Yurena Zerr)
On July 24, 2017 — two years before sentencing — Jessica Reznicek can be seen in a shaky video with her activist partner Ruby Montoya, a former elementary school teacher who was 27 at the time. They stand in front of a group of journalists next to a busy street. The speech they give would drastically change their lives.
After several months of secretly sabotaging one of the country’s most controversial construction projects, the two women, whose paths would later part, went public. “We acted for our children because the world they inherit does not meet their needs. There are over five major bodies of water here in Iowa, and none of them are clean. After having explored and exhausted all avenues of process, including attending public hearings, gathering signatures for valid requests for environmental impact statements, participating in civil disobedience, hunger strikes, marches and rallies, boycotts and encampments, we saw the clear refusal of our government to hear the people’s demands.”
That’s why Reznicek and Montoya burned five machines at a pipeline construction site in Iowa on election night in November 2016. They would later change their methods, using a welding torch to dismantle the pipeline’s surface-mounted steel valves, delaying construction by weeks. “After the success of this peaceful action, we began to use this tactic up and down the pipeline, throughout Iowa,” the two women say.
But no media reported on their activities; the corporation cited other — false — reasons for the delay. When the activists noticed during an action that oil was already flowing in the pipes, they decided to go public, as they had to admit a kind of defeat.
The two women appear clear and determined on this day in the summer of 2017 as they take turns reciting their pre-written text. “If there are any regrets, it is that we did not act enough.” They end their speeches and are led away in handcuffs by three police officers.
Using the slogan “Mni wiconi,” meaning “Water is Life,” in the Lakota (Sioux) language, a broad movement was organized in 2016 against the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline. The protest of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe garnered national and international attention.
The tribe sees the construction of the pipeline as a threat to their water supply because the pipeline runs under Lake Oahe, which is near the reservation. Other bodies of water are also at risk because the pipeline crosses under rivers and lakes in many places, which could contaminate the drinking water of many people in the event of an accident. In addition, ancient burial sites and sacred places of great cultural value would be threatened by the construction. Opponents of the pipeline speak of ecological racism — not only because Indigenous rights to self-government would be curtailed, but also because the construction of so-called Man Camps (temporary container cities for construction workers who move from other states) would lead to prostitution and an increase in violence against Indigenous women.
Their government — the Sioux Tribe is a sovereign nation — issued a resolution back in 2015 saying the pipeline “poses a serious risk to the very survival of our tribe and […] would destroy valuable cultural resources.” Construction would also break the Fort Laramie Treaty, which guarantees them the “undisturbed use and occupation” of reservation land. But their arguments went unheard by both the company and the government.
The operating company said the pipeline would not harm the environment, would not affect Indigenous rights and would not pose a threat to drinking water supplies. But the protest, which stretches across several states along the pipeline, has developed into one of the largest environmental movements in the United States. Native Americans from different nations and reservations are joining, along with landowners, environmental organizations and left-wing autonomous movements.
Reznicek first heard about the pipeline when she was released from prison six years ago, after serving a two-month stint for her protest against a U.S. military weapons contractor in Omaha, Nebraska. An organizer from Standing Rock had come to Des Moines to mobilize people for the protest. “I decided that I wanted to learn more about Indigenous ceremony, understanding that I am a white person, I cannot just go in and express my demands. And I also wanted to focus on stopping the Dakota Access Pipeline Project. So I drove up to Standing Rock.”
Where it all began
On a road on the outskirts of Des Moines — a city home to numerous insurance companies — large trees tower above the wooden row houses, providing shade on a hot July day.
Above the porch of one of the houses hangs a small sign that reads “Catholic Worker House.” In front of the back part of the building are tables and benches with people sitting on them. Music is playing, people are singing, someone is asleep on a bench.
In the kitchen of the house, Jessica Reznicek stands in front of the stove and slices five chicken breasts, freeing the meat from the bones. Next to them is a large pot of mashed potatoes, into which she generously spreads butter. “Our guests love butter,” Reznicek laughs. The kitchen looks as if many meals have been cooked there. Posters with anti-war messages and protest slogans are hung around the small room. On the windowsill in front of Reznicek is a statue of a bishop with a rosary around his neck.
Twice a week, Jessica Reznicek cooks for the homeless guests who come here. Usually they eat together in the living room, but since the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic, the food is distributed through the window.
“I like the days when I’m in charge of the kitchen. It takes my mind off all the things that are going on in my head,” Reznicek says as she begins washing a mountain of dishes.
Two years have passed since her protests were made public. A year ago, Jessica Reznicek moved back into the community, spending time there on house arrest. Here, where it all began, her long journey ends. She has one week left before needing to report to prison.
Just before the food is served, the kitchen and living room fill up. Two of Reznicek’s friends are there, residents of the house and volunteers from outside — together they begin to serve food to the guests.
Reznicek has been in and out of the house for 10 years. Most people know her story: “The one who blew up the pipeline?” asks Jimmy — one of the homeless guests — laughing as he tastes the still-warm mashed potatoes. The fact that she will soon be gone saddens many of the residents. For the majority of them, prison is a familiar place. But no one here has been incarcerated as long as Jessica Reznicek will be.
The Dingman House, named after a late bishop in Des Moines, is one of four side-by-side buildings of the Catholic Worker community. Christianity and anarchism meet here. In these self-organized “houses of hospitality,” which function independently of the church, people live and work among the poor in the spirit of the Sermon on the Mount. The Christian message of social justice and solidarity with the marginalized becomes everyday practice. There is not much overlap with the institutional Catholic Church. In the bathroom, where homeless guests can shower, there are free condoms; trans people find shelter here and women sometimes lead church services.
Preparations for prison
The Berrigan House across the street — named after two priests who became known for their actions of civil disobedience against the Vietnam War — has always been a place of resistance, where protest actions are planned and activists find shelter. This is where Reznicek prepared her actions against the pipeline.
As in the house next door, the walls are covered with posters calling for resistance against war, racism and injustice. It is a colorful, chaotic and untidy atmosphere. Reznicek and her friends Alex and Monty sit at the table in the living room. The two are among her closest supporters. They just had a video conversation with Reznicek’s lawyer to discuss the final steps before she goes to jail.
A month after Reznicek is sentenced to eight years in prison, they launched a campaign called “Water Defenders Are Never Terrorists.” Within a few weeks, they were able to collect thousands of signatures. Their goal: a petition to President Joe Biden and Congress demanding the terrorism charges be dropped.
The list of things to do before Reznicek goes to prison is long: return the electronic ankle bracelet, pick up the copy of her high school transcript she needs so she won’t have to attend classes in jail. T-shirts demanding her release are to be printed. Reznicek also wants to develop photos that Alex will later send to her in prison so she can decorate her cell with them. But they also want to see her favorite musical Rent, go dancing one more time, invite friends and celebrate. There is a lot of laughter when the three get together.
Jessica Reznicek’s supporters Monty and Alex in the Christian Berrigan House. (Cristina Yurena Zerr)
After the meeting, Jessica Reznicek packs a vacuum cleaner and cleaning supplies and heads out. With permission from her probation officer, she started cleaning private homes a year ago. She also worked at a pizzeria from time to time.
Why is Jessica Reznicek willing to spend eight years of her life in prison because of her commitment to clean water? She was studying political science in Des Moines and married when she learned about the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011. Shortly after, she decided to go to New York for the protests. This meant the end of her marriage. From the East Coast, she began a new life of sorts, always on the move, searching for a way to make her contribution to a more just world.
Reznicek traveled twice to Palestine and Israel, where she was deported for protesting in solidarity with the Palestinian people. She visited the Zapatistas in Mexico and spent time in Central America with the Indigenous people of Guatemala. In South Korea, she protested the construction of a U.S. Navy base. “So I feel like all of these experiences culminated at this point in my life when I heard about the Dakota Access Pipeline.”
The Catholic Worker community in Des Moines was central to her politicization. She stumbled upon the organization after returning to Iowa from New York. There begins what she later calls a conversion: a return to the Christian faith and her Catholic roots. At the same time, this means a radicalization in the struggle against injustice: Jesus Christ is seen Catholic Workers as a revolutionary who stood up for the disenfranchised, for the weak and the poor. He wanted to drive the kings from their thrones and bring justice. And he died on the cross without resisting his judgement.
Three months after Jessica Reznicek made her actions public in 2017, the Berrigan home was surrounded by the FBI. “It was like 4:30 in the morning when they were pounding on the door. The house was actually shaking. I ran downstairs and could see around 50 agents through the window with big guns and vests.”
When she opened the door, the house was stormed by about 50 uniforms. She was thrown to the ground and held at gunpoint, she said.
She then spent a year in hiding, calling it her wanderings. “I wasn’t necessarily underground. I think that I was running and I was hiding, but it was not exclusively from the federal government. I was not hiding from prison. I was hiding from everything.”
When she broke down after 10 months in Colorado, she finally realized she needed help. It won’t come from people or places, Reznicek says, but from her relationship with God. After this experience, she realized she wanted to live in a place where she could encounter God, so she decided to enter a Benedictine convent as a novice. But no sooner does she arrive than Reznicek is again picked up by the FBI and charged. They send her back to Des Moines — to the Berrigan home — to await the verdict under house arrest.
For the last four days before she goes to prison, Jessica Reznicek was given permission to visit the sisters at the convent community in Duluth. After her incarceration, she would like to move there or — if that’s not possible — live as close to the convent as she can.
On August 11th, Benedictine sisters drove Jessica Reznicek to the women’s prison in Wascea, Minnesota, four hours away. There, 714 women currently live behind the walls and fences.
Three hundred miles to the north is the town of Bemidji, home of Energy Transfer, the energy company to which Reznicek will be in debt for the rest of her life. A new pipeline called Line 3 has been under construction at this location for several years. As with the Dakota Access Pipeline, the region’s Indigenous inhabitants — the Anishinaabe and Ojibwe tribes — will be most affected by the project.
“Today I feel sad to be saying my final goodbyes to loved ones,” Reznicek said. “I am strengthened, however, knowing that I’m still standing with integrity during this very important moment in history, as there truly is no other place to be standing at a time like this.”
With these words she takes leave of her friends and turns to face the prison gates.
by DGR News Service | Mar 15, 2016 | Listening to the Land
Featured Image: Abandoned mill near Sorrento, Italy, by Jason Wallace
Derrick Jensen / Deep Green Resistance
In the time after, the buffalo come home. At first only a few, shaking snow off their shoulders as they pass from mountain to plain. Big bulls sweep away snowpack from the soft grass beneath; big cows attend to and protect their young. The young themselves delight, like the young everywhere, in the newness of everything they see, smell, taste, touch, and feel.
Wolves follow the buffalo, as do mallards, gadwalls, blue-winged teal, northern shovelers, northern pintails, redheads, canvasbacks, and tundra swans. Prairie dogs come home, bringing with them the rain, and bringing with them ferrets, foxes, hawks, eagles, snakes, and badgers. With all of these come meadowlarks and red-winged blackbirds. With all of these come the tall and short grasses. With these come the prairies.
In the time after, the salmon come home, swimming over broken dams to forests who have never forgotten the feeling of millions of fish turning their rivers black and roiling, filling the rivers so full that sunlight does not reach the bottom of even shallow streams. In the time after, the forests remember a feeling they’ve never forgotten, of embracing these fish that are as much a part of these forests as are cedars and spruce and bobcats and bears.
In the time after, the beavers come home, bringing with them caddisflies and dragonflies, bringing with them ponds and pools and wetlands, bringing home frogs, newts, and fish. Beavers build and build, and restore and restore, working hard to unmake the damage that was done, and to remake forests and rivers and streams and marshes into who they once were, into who they need to be, into who they will be again..
In the time after, plants save the world.
In the time after, the oceans are filled with fish, with forests of kelp and communities of coral. In the time after, the air is full with the steamy breath of whales, and the shores are laden with the hard shells and patient, ageless eyes of sea turtles. Seals haul out on sea ice, and polar bears hunt them.
In the time after, buffalo bring back prairies by being buffalo, and prairies bring back buffalo by being prairies. Salmon bring back forests by being salmon, and forests bring back salmon by being forests. Cell by cell, leaf by leaf, limb by limb, prairie and forest and marsh and ocean; they bring the carbon home, burying it in the ground, holding it in their bodies. They do what they have done before and what they will do again.
The time after is a time of magic. Not the magic of parlor tricks, not the magic of smoke and mirrors, distractions that point one’s attention away from the real action. No, this magic is the real action. This magic is the embodied intelligence of the world and its members. This magic is the rough skin of sharks without which they would not swim so fast, so powerfully. This magic is the long tongues of butterflies and the flowers who welcome them. This magic is the brilliance of fruits and berries who grow to be eaten by those who then distribute their seeds along with the nutrients necessary for new growth. This magic is the work of fungi who join trees and mammals and bacteria to create a forest. This magic is the billions of beings in a handful of soil. This magic is the billions of beings who live inside you, who make it possible for you to live.
In the time before, the world was resilient, beautiful, and strong. It happened through the magic of blood flowing through capillaries, and the magic of tiny seeds turning into giant redwoods, and the magic of long relationships between rivers and mountains, and the magic of complex dances between all members of natural communities. It took life and death, and the gifts of the dead, forfeited to the living, to make the world strong.
In the time after, this is understood.
In the time after, there is sorrow for those who did not make it: passenger pigeons, great auks, dodos, striped rocksnails, Charles Island tortoises, Steller’s sea cows, Darling Downs hopping mice, Guam flying foxes, Saudi gazelle, sea mink, Caspian tigers, quaggas, laughing owls, St. Helena olives, Cape Verde giant skinks, silver trout, Galapagos amaranths.
But in those humans and non-humans who survive, there is another feeling, emerging from below and beyond and around and through this sorrow. In the time after, those still alive begin to feel something almost none have felt before, something that everyone felt long, long ago. What those who come in the time after feel is a sense of realistic optimism, a sense that things will turn out all right, a sense that life, which so desperately wants to continue, will endure, will thrive.
We, living now, in the time before, have choices. We can remember what it is to be animals on this planet and remember and understand what it is to live and die such that our lives and deaths help make the world stronger. We can live and die such that we make possible a time after where life flourishes, where buffalo can come home, and the same for salmon and prairie dogs and prairies and forests and carbon and rivers and mountains.
Originally published in the Spring 2016 issue of YES! Magazine.
by DGR News Service | Mar 18, 2014 | Toxification
By Reuters
A major oil pipeline owned by Sunoco Logistics Partners LP leaked thousands of gallons of crude oil into a nature preserve in southwest Ohio late on Monday.
Between 7,000 and 10,000 gallons (26,000-38,000 liters) of sweet crude leaked into the Oak Glen Nature Preserve about a quarter of a mile from the Great Miami River, according to early estimates from the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency.
The leak, which occurred on a line operated by Mid-Valley Pipeline Co, a division of Sunoco, was discovered at 8:20 p.m. EDT on Monday (0020 GMT Tuesday). The company shut the line, which helped reduce the pressure of the leaking oil, an EPA spokeswoman said, but it was unclear if oil was still spewing from the pipe.
Some oil reached a wetland a mile away and on Tuesday, clean-up crews were preparing to vacuum the wetland, located 20 miles north of Cincinnati.
The oil did not appear to have reached the Great Miami River, though tests were still being completed, the EPA said.
“The extent of impact to the resource is currently unknown,” said a statement from the Great Parks of Hamilton County, which oversees the Oak Glen preserve. “The EPA is assessing the situation to determine appropriate action.”
Sunoco was not immediately available for comment.
The pipeline is part of Sunoco’s mid-west system that runs about 1,000 miles from Longview, Texas to Samaria, Michigan, providing crude oil to a number of refineries, primarily in the U.S. Midwest.
Read more from The Raw Story: http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/03/18/major-oil-pipeline-leaks-more-than-7000-gallons-of-crude-oil-into-ohio-nature-preserve/
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Jan 15, 2014 | Obstruction & Occupation, Repression at Home
By Cal Winslow
Will Parrish needs your support. He now faces eight years in prison; in addition, $490,000 in fines, “restitution”. And for what? For delaying a freeway, the “Redwood Highway” – the California 101.
Parrish is a journalist here in Willits, in Mendocino County. He is also an activist and a teacher. His trial is scheduled for the County Courthouse in Ukiah, at 8:30 AM, on January 28th.
Will’s crime must be peculiarly Californian, a crime against a freeway. It must, from the grave, be raising Ronald Reagan’s hackles, jolting his memory. We’re told, incessantly in the media, this delay also enrages our ordinary travelers; drivers, it seems, now delayed five minutes (or so) along the main street of Willits on the trip to Eureka.
Willits, Eureka, Mendocino, Humboldt, why here? In this wildest corner of the state? “California’s transportation infrastructure – once the freeway wonder of the world – now lags hopelessly behind…”, Mike Davis tells us this, and quite rightly, but you can’t say they’re not trying. The issue here is a bypass.
Mike’s down south, where the people are. Things are different here. There are fewer than 5000 people in Willits, its population in decline; there are just about 90,000 people in Mendocino County, a few more than in new Mayor Bill De Blasio’s Brooklyn neighborhood. But this is a big County, nearly 100 miles south to north. We have lots of elbow room. And that’s Mendocino; take 101 north and there’s hardly anyone at all. The shrewd driver, once in southern Humboldt, can easily make up the time. Then it’s the supermax at Pelican Bay in nothing flat.
But it doesn’t matter, it’s systemic. Caltrans, the state’s mega transportation department is pushing the bypass at Willits; it’s wanted it for a long time. It’s for our own good, of course. And Caltrans has a plan. A master plan? Indeed it’s had this very plan for twenty years (it seems it’s always a good time for a new freeway). Caltrans has proposed and is now building a $200 million, six mile, four-lane freeway the size of Interstate 5.
Willits is “the Gateway to the Redwoods”, drivers learn this from a large arch they pass under (not from actual trees). They also navigate a five mile stretch of two lane traffic, two lights, then an array of shops, etc., few really worth slowing down for. The one real problem, let’s be fair here, is the snag where state route 20, at Safeway and a light, turns off to Fort Bragg and the Coast. It is a bottleneck. I’ve seen rush hour traffic backed up two or three blocks, delays of five minutes or so. But let’s have some perspective on this. We’re out in the country, on our way to the Redwoods, the few remaining. We’re just not talking about the BQE on Monday morning or the Santa Monica Freeway on Tuesday nights.
So $200 million? California is just clawing itself out of the recession. We’ve hardly had time to catch our breath, how will we undo the damage done to our schools, our services, our health and welfare? Costs still figure even here, even in this latest boomlet. Caltrans likes to keep it quiet, but the first stage of the freeway bypass will be only two lanes, though construction will prepare for an eventual four. Back to Mike Davis, there’s something more than meets the eye here, something “primal”.
Good, sensible people in Willits have been fighting the bypass here for twenty years; they’ve challenged Caltrans every foot of the way – they’ve demanded proper public input, attention to environmental regulations, a haven for rare birds, and protection of wetlands, this last elemental, primary in terms of survival here in (too) thirsty California. It’s amazing, the persistence of these people. And they’ve been willing to seek compromises – perhaps a smaller project. But Caltrans has been patient too (and with 22,000 employees, the state’s huge contractors on your side, also the local politicians, building trades unions, etc., I suppose it’s easy to be patient).
Will Parish is a new-comer of sorts to this (a new-comer in California? Is that an oxymoron?). He’s been up here in Mendocino County for just four years, and we’re very lucky for it. Will grew up in Santa Cruz, his parents teachers, his home fronting a Redwood forest, his childhood sanctuary. Will went to UC Santa Cruz, majoring there in Sociology and Journalism. The administration apparently considered the Journalism School a problem (a sure sign it was doing its job), and used the 2003 round of cuts to get rid of it. Will reckons he’s the last of its graduates.
Will, as a journalist, sought out issues of power and war; he dug into the roots of the Bay Area’s war connections, in particular those in the UC system – no shortage of material there. Nuclear weapons, nuclear power appalled him. And he combined writing with activism; he is a journalist in the best tradition of our muckrakers, a writer “with his boots on the ground”. This is a good expression, I think; I’m taking it from my mentor, the late Edward Thompson, in his own time a relentless opponent of the war machine, of nuclear weapons in particular, writer and activist.
Close Counterpunch readers will remember Will’s many contributions including: How Imperial San Franciscans Loot the Planet (February 26-28 2010 with Darwin Bond-Graham) and Who Runs the University of California? (March 01, 2010 with Bond-Graham). And here in wine country his focus has been the burgeoning wine industry: see pieces including In the Shadow of the Gallos; Sonoma County, Banana Republic of Wine Grapes (January 21-23, 2011).
In Mendocino Will began with a focus has been the burgeoning wine industry, its owners, its workers and its place in the economy (see, for example, In the Shadow of the Gallos; Sonoma County, Banana Republic of Wine Grapes, Counterpunch, January 21-23, 2011). And on the wetlands of the Little Lake Valley.
“When I first came here, Willits, I fell in love with the tranquility here, with the mountains, the boggy marshes, the grasslands, the eco-diversity, the space. And no freeway. The 101 stops just south of Willits – that makes it a different world here.
“My journalism, my practice, has always been to scan the horizon, to look for the most pressing problems, to look for the problems that most need addressing.
“The bypass issue struck me as a really big problem, a thing that really needed addressing. And that meant getting involved; I can’t write and not be involved.” (See “The Insanity of the Willits Bypass”, in the Ukiah Blog, January 8th, 2013)
Here’s an example:
“As Willits’ settlers set about gridding the land and marketing it to cattle ranchers and timber merchants, they rapidly removed the wetlands. They did the same to the Pomo villagers and wildlife — waterfowl, pelicans, vast herds of Tule elk and antelope, etc. — that had dwelled among the marshes and springs for so long. The early Euroamerican pioneers incised streambeds, redirected creeks, constructed artificial drainage ditches, and ripped apart the hardpan layers of topsoil that contained the water, allowing it to seep slowly into the ground.
“Some of the moisture that time had stored on the land remains, though, most notably within the marshy area on the north end of the valley, extending across Route 101 on the west and Reynolds Highway on the east. The area acts as a collection point for three creeks that flow through the valley. It is then drained by Outlet Creek, a tributary of the Eel River. Among its other contributions to what might be called the “real world” of inland Mendocino County, Outlet Creek provides the longest remaining run for the endangered Coho salmon of any river tributary in California.
In June, Will climbed a wick drain “stitcher”, a giant machine there to plant tens of thousands of drainage tubes along the path of freeway construction, tubes to drain the wetlands and stabilize the earth upon which the highway will be built – in the process destroying Little Lake Valley wetlands, the largest Northern California wetlands to be drained in any single project in the past fifty years. So David and Goliath again. Will: “Caltrans is a scofflaw agency that, by virtue of a failed political and regulatory system, is facing no other forms of real accountability for causing immense and probably irreversible destruction of Little Lake Valley.”
An important argument in this entire conflict is that the whole project is illegal, Caltrans having violated nearly every regulation possible.
“I threw myself in because the more I came to understand this the more upset I became. The Willits project epitomizes so much of everything that is wrong; it epitomizes the power dynamics that underlie all the problems I see in society.”
Will lived on a platform, more than fifty feet up, for eleven days. Will is six foot five, no, not a basketball player, rather tennis, a large, attentive, kind man, hair flowing like Clay Matthew’s, only dark brown. Gentle, yes. Passive, no. Will on the stitcher was a figure not to be missed. And the California Highway Patrol (CHP) took every precaution in bringing him down – precaution meaning that they overwhelmed him, attacking with swat teams, climbing specialists (a career path), hoisted in giant bucket loaders, prepared with saws specifically designed to cut him loose. But not until the entire project had been halted.
This story has not generated the emotion, the energy of Julia Butterfly Hill’s but it demands our attention, as do dozens of such projects here in California’s Northwest. They are fundamental contests. They are about our future. In the stitcher Will lived in a sort of house arrest, surrounded on the ground by dozens of the small army of CHP troopers brought into Willits. He was deprived of food; the CHP even arrested six people who attempted to bring him supplies. He went six days without food, surviving an unseasonal rain storm, also bitter cold.
Construction started in February, 2013, but was delayed until spring. Will was not the first to be arrested. There were others, tree sitters, people who sat down in the paths of bulldozers (West Bank weapons) – fifty people in all have been arrested, these people too demand our support. They include a core of those who have kept this crusade alive, all these years. In truth, it’s been a small group that has kept this issue alive; many were the young at heart – often 50, 60, even 70 year olds, but tenacious. Against them the troopers, the choppers, the armed vehicles.
Will is charged with trespassing, “unlawful entry”. (He is also charged with two “resisting arrests”.) So Will and his supporters expected him to be charged with two or three two misdemeanors. Some tree sitters have yet to be charged with anything. The Mendocino County District Attorney, David Eyster, typical of the small town bullies we suffer as DA’s, offered a plea bargain, but this left Will subject to restitution. Will refused, asked for a jury trial. Infuriated, Eyster made a package of the misdemeanors; charging Will instead with 16 misdemeanors, these with a cumulative maximum eight-year jail sentence. As it happens, Caltrans then piled on with a demand for $490.000.02 in restitution. The costs of delay!
I have heard it said that the sentence demanded in this case is unusual, harsh in nominally liberal and eco-friendly Mendocino County. True, this isn’t South Carolina, and it is also true that there is something of a history of tolerance in this County. And there is radicalism of a certain kind; many here are on alert for peak oil, Fukushima, broken bridges, marine protectors, black choppers. And thank heavens for it. But, for the few who will remember, Tony Craver and Norm Vroman are gone. Still, there is a curious way in which Eyster relates to the growers, so he often gets a pass. But he’s not on his own, he’s certainly not the only bully in the County, and he’s not the only one who is happy to not see our biggest industries’ bad behaviors.
Will has lived up to his self-pledge to seek out the most pressing problems, and to get to the bottom of them. In this case he’s found wetlands. And water, fundamentals for all California, and no small concern here in California, now in the grips of an historic drought. Wetlands take us to water and water to the growers. The grape growers here are not mom and pop operations; they are more likely Silicon Valley veterans, wealthy people with more money than they know what to do with. They come here to concoct boutique wines; but premium wine production touches everything, from the price of land to the very structure of labor, and not for the better. They create the groomed landscape that the Anderson Valley has become. But they also consume the water; now, as we await our rainy season, we have dry creeks and depleted rivers. And they bring pesticides, and all the nasty environmental procedures that are the unmentionables in an eco-friendly County. And these are not on David Eyster’s agenda. And salmon that still don’t come back. Will Parrish is our Lincoln Steffens (The Shame of the Cities, 1904). And they don’t like him.
There is a similar story with our biggest industry, that is, with “the crop”, marijuana. Of course it’s an underground economy; of course it has its victims, its innocents. Yet it too is extractive in the worst senses; it too drains our streams, poisons them, it drives up the price of land, it too takes the profits away. It creates our culture of secrecy; ask no questions, it stretches out the class divide while thriving on illusions of community. No wonder Mendocino is still a poor County, its schools struggle, its public services all but non-existent. Our “infrastructure” crumbles – our County roads? No help from Caltrans for these. And Will has had the courage to say this.
So why is Eyster being the bully? I think we have a conspiracy here, but it’s an open conspiracy, its origins, its cast of characters is right here for all to see. Caltrans wants roads, big roads; the builders want to build. Eyster’s job, grease the wheels. It’s systemic. Why would he not be the bully? A few examples will quiet things down, or so he seems to think. He’s got Will Parrish on deck.
The 101 is named the Redwood Highway and for good reason. Its construction began in the twenties – for us in the North it begins on the Golden Gate Bridge; it then passes through a series of lovely valleys until it reaches the mountains of northern Mendocino County, then it follows the South Fork of the Eel toward Eureka and on to the Oregon border. Its initial construction was promoted as a pathway to a tourist’s paradise, that is, the motoring tourist. It opened up a new world, magnificent yet until then inaccessible. The 101 had on offer – for those with cars – giant trees, raging wild rivers, steep canyons, rugged mountains, there to see, yet all without a step out the door.
There was another intention, however. By the twenties, the coastal Redwood forests were all but exhausted; the depression of the thirties put an end to the “harvest”. There remained, however, millions of acres of old growth Redwood, just out of reach of the coastal mills. Not, however, out of reach of the truck, the bulldozer and the chain saw. The 101 cleared the way that led to the final ravaging of the forest; in sheer destruction it far surpassed that of the late nineteenth century, though the old images – man vs. tree – still dominate our imagination of this history. The result, today fewer than four percent of the old growth survives. Second and third growth forests still are cut; there is farming. But the great Redwood forests, once a common of unimaginable value, a true wonder of the world, remain only terribly wounded, and almost all as private property, no trespassing.
This part of California, its “wildest” corner, grabs people, it moves them. It’s got Will and the Willits tree sitters, Warbler and the others, the bulldozer blockaders (I think of Rachel Corrie), its geriatric Wobblies facing down the troopers. And Willits is not the only site of conflict. Caltrans wants the road widened at Richardson Grove; it wants the road up to Oregon straightened. Never mind our remaining giant trees. Never mind the Smith River canyon, the path to the sea of California’s only undammed river.
I see the conspiracy when I drive home from the City, up the 101 to Cloverdale. It’s not hidden. The traffic on an afternoon is of course catastrophe in Northern Marin and on through Sonoma to Santa Rosa. So the solution? There are massive projects now in place, ever widening the highway, knocking down whatever is left in its path, so far almost to Windsor.
In its path, strip malls and giant box stores follow, one after another; sometimes it’s as if we’re in a tunnel of Mall. Then comes the sprawl.
And so it continues, the highways will soon be jammed again; Caltrans will push on northwards. Development. Plunder. Profit. It’s a “primal scene”, Mike Davis (Ecology of Fear) again. The widenings, the bypasses, these are “the familiar tremors heralding an eruption of growth that will wipe away human and natural history”.
Will and his comrades see this, the insanity of it all. They understand that this will not stop at Cloverdale or Ukiah. They understand the damage being done – “to human and natural history”.
The wetlands in Little Lake Valley are small, really; they have already been damaged by the agriculturalists of a century ago. Are they worth saving? I wondered if the Willits fighters had not perhaps exaggerated.
Counterpunch readers will recognize Ignacio Chapela as the microbial ecologist and mycologist at the University of California, Berkeley, known for exposure of the flow of transgenes into wild maize.
Ignacio explains, “The highland wetlands are the basis of the health of the whole environment, this includes all the ecosystems downstream, they are the basis for everything, our water, the diversity of species, everything is at stake.”
“Will is a young investigative reporter, one of a kind. He’s not afraid of pursuing questions to their ultimate consequence. It’s not surprising at all to me that he’s working on wetlands, he understands environmental problems deeply and has the unique capacity to make these clear in his writings.
“It would be a terrible loss for California, also for environmental journalists everywhere, if he is silenced – even slowed down.
“I want to do whatever I can to do to support him and I want invite everyone to join us.”
So do I.
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Support Will in Court. Ukiah County Courthouse, 8:30 am, January 28, 2014
Send messages to: Mendocino District Attorney David Eyster at Eysterd@co.mendocino.ca.us
or to
Supervisor Fifth District, Dan Hamburg at Hamburgd@co.mendocino.ca.us
Contributions can be sent to: Little Lake Valley Legal Fund/Will Parrish, Box 131, Willits, CA 95490
