by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Jan 23, 2014 | ANALYSIS, Male Supremacy
By Rachel / Deep Green Resistance Eugene
Yesterday was the 41st anniversary of the Supreme Court decision that made it illegal for federal and state governments to make blanket, outright bans on abortion. For those who fight for women’s ability to exercise full autonomy and human rights, January 22nd is treated as a day of celebration and remembrance of those who fought before us. Nonprofits, advocacy organizations, and student groups from coast to coast held benefits and awareness events. Celebratory twitter hashtags and blurbs from liberal blogs are still piling up. Good news is scarce in the world of reproductive justice activism, and we’ll take it where we can get it. I won’t begrudge our beleaguered cause one day of hope – at least, not until the morning after.
The reality of our situation gives the lie to much of the hopeful rhetoric that comes rolling out every year on Roe’s anniversary. Our backward slide doesn’t look to be slowing anytime soon. If we face the the reality of what Roe has done, self-congratulatory reflections on how far we’ve come become not only ridiculous and out of touch, but insulting and dangerous as well. A prime example of the rose-colored view of Roe espoused by many in the mainstream is this sentence, written by President and CEO of Planned Parenthood Federation of America on the 38th anniversary of Roe, three years ago:
Thirty-eight years after Roe gave America’s women the right and the opportunity to plan for their families and control their reproductive health, this tenet of modern American rights is under assault. [1]
It’s deeply disturbing to see someone in Richards’ position giving credence to the fantasy articulated here, even while she acknowledges that our meager gains are under threat. After all the dust had settled, Roe and the relevant subsequent court decisions made it illegal for federal and state governments to ban abortion outright before the point of a fetus’s viability outside the womb– that’s it. There is no language whatsoever in the entire decision that guarantees women the right to an abortion. If there was such language, women would be able to use the precedent of Roe to sue their government if they, for instance, were prevented by lack of resources from obtaining an abortion. This is not the case.
The decision in Roe was based on the right to privacy in the 14th Amendment, a right most often invoked within the law to protect consumer decisions. Within a for-profit healthcare system, medical decisions are consumer decisions, and only middle to upper class (predominantly white) women have the resources to exercise meaningful choices regarding abortion. Roe doesn’t challenge that fact – it affirms and reinforces it.
Even more laughable is the idea that Roe gave “America’s women” the opportunity to access abortion. From the beginning, the only American women who were granted the opportunity to control their reproduction were those who could pay. The Hyde Amendment banned Medicare from covering abortion access just a few short years after Roe, effectively obliterating abortion access for millions of poor women. The oft-repeated mantra of “never go back” loses all meaning when in reality, only a select group of women were ever permitted to escape. The slow strangle of targeted regulation and domestic terrorism campaigns make abortion progressively more expensive to obtain, as women have to travel further to reach clinics. Roe does not confer rights or opportunity, it bestows privilege upon women of means.
In the three years since Cecile Richards wrote that sentence, more restrictions on reproductive freedom have been enacted than in the ten years prior. Eighty seven percent of counties have no abortion provider. Insurance bans and medicare prohibition like the Hyde Amendment, combined with geographical obstacles, TRAP laws, and the constant threat of violence against women and clinic workers, make abortion inaccessible or a significant hardship for the majority of women in the United States. Legislation granting personhood to pregnancies (and thereby taking personhood away from women) continues to advance, and record numbers of women are being jailed for failing to successfully carry their pregnancies to term. One hopes that in recent years, Richards and her organization have been disabused of such fantastical notions of Roe’s capabilities. Indeed, this year’s obligatory missive from PPFA takes a somewhat more urgent tone.
Roe is not enough, and we know it. But stopping at acknowledging Roe’s shortcomings still glosses over the reality of what Roe has done – and it’s not all good.
Most contemporary discussion of the “Pre-Roe Era” goes something like this: “Before this landmark decision, abortions were completely illegal, and desperate women had to resort to unsafe, backalley procedures, many of which resulted in their deaths.” [2]
The above narrative is a popular just-so story, but it completely obscures the reality of how women were forced into the horrific situations it describes. This narrative is not only incomplete, it’s also Euro-centric. Many indigenous cultures practiced a variety of methods for terminating pregnancy and controlling reproduction. European invasion, colonization, and the ongoing genocide of indigenous peoples has meant the almost total erasure of traditional knowledge including that of how abortions were performed. The systematic rape of indigenous women as a weapon of war continues today, further denying them any reproductive control. Starting in the early sixteen hundreds, captured Africans sold as slaves were denied any and all reproductive control. Female slaves and freed African women experience both forced childbirth and forced sterilization, both of which continue. Last year it came out that at least 148 women were forcible sterilized between 2006 and 2010 in the California prison system. [3]
Supporters held a candlelight vigil in front of the Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 22, 2005, to commemorate the 32nd anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision. (Pablo Martinez Monsivais, Associated Press)
The history of reproductive restriction on this continent dates back to well before the official inception of the United States, however the kind of criminalization that Roe attempted to address is a phenomenon unique to the last couple centuries. Abortion was surprisingly accepted among early European settlers up until the point of “quickening,” which referred to the first time a woman felt her fetus move within her womb. Individual women of course were often controlled in all aspects of life, including reproduction, by their husbands and fathers – something that continues today. But abortion was legal for white women up until that certain point in pregnancy. Practitioners were often midwives, or women without formal medical training. Many popular abortion techniques were medicinal and therefore there was no abortionist, only the woman. Colonial home medical guides gave recipes for “bringing on the menses” with herbs that could be grown in one’s garden or easily found in the woods. These were not always safe, but they were not illegal, and they were largely under female control.
In the 1820’s, states began outlawing abortion, and though these laws were couched in religious language just as they are today, the rise of abortion restriction mirrored rising fears that the higher birthrate of racial and religious minority populations would lead to a protestant minority and a white minority, an idea that still sends shivers down the spines of our white male leaders.
In 1868 Horatio R. Storer, one of the leading anti-abortion crusaders, is quoted:
Will the West be filled by our own children or by those of aliens? This is a question our women must answer; upon their loins depends the future destiny of the nation. [4]
Unfortunately, Storer and other physicians were not satisfied to leave the answer to that question up to women or our loins. They decided to take matters into their own hands. In the late eighteen hundreds, the American Medical Association (which was then an entirely male controlled institution) lobbied aggressively for the criminalization of abortion.
The frightful extent of [abortion in the US] is found in the grave defects of our laws, both common and statute, as regards the independent and actual existence of the child before birth, as a living being. These errors, which are sufficient in most instances to prevent conviction, are based, and only based, upon mistaken and exploded medical dogmas. -1859 AMA Committee [5]
So according to these men, the prevalence abortion was not based on the needs or decisions of women, but on incorrect medical understanding. If this was true, then as the newly knighted elite of the medical industry, they were conveniently declaring themselves as the only authorities qualified to correct the medical misunderstanding that lead to abortion. This was a bid for control, because it ensured that the only people who had the authority to perform abortions were male, formally trained physicians. By 1900, every state had abortion restrictions on the books, and it’s been all downhill from there. There’s a lot of information and analysis out there about the medicalization of birth, and how the absorption of reproduction into the medical industry, and the reclassifying of birth from a natural process to a medical phenomenon, has been bad for women overall. This is also true of the medicalization of abortion. The practice of medicine during this period went from a more community based structure with widwives and female healers having a place particularly in reproductive aspects of health, to the absorption of this community structure into the commercial medical industry. The medicalization and the criminalization of abortion went hand in hand. Both increased male control and decreased female reproductive autonomy.
Roe does nothing to challenge this hostile takeover of female reproductive decisions by male dominated institutions. Roe codifies governmental regulation of abortion in law, and it institutionalized the total dependence of women on the medical industry with regard to reproduction. Never once in the text of Roe v. Wade is a woman referred to as having made a decision on her own; every single time a woman’s decision is mentioned, it’s as “a woman and her physician.” When we put this language into context with the usurption of reproductive control by the commercial medical industry, the effect of Roe becomes a lot more sinister.
In all of our romanticization of Roe’s effects, why do we never speak of the fact that in the pre-Roe era, women weren’t fighting the government over how abortion should be regulated – they were fighting over whether the government had the right to exercise any control over female reproduction. By accepting governmental regulation as a baseline, we’re giving up ground that pre-Roe activists fought for tooth and nail. NARAL – which now stands for National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League – was original named National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws. During some demonstrations, activists would hand out sheets of paper with their ideal version of abortion restriction – and it was a blank sheet of paper. Our foremothers knew that if we accept any control over reproduction by the government and medical industry, we fail utterly to protect women’s reproductive autonomy.
The text of the Roe decision also left one obvious and frightening door to the total criminalization of abortion wide open, and it didn’t take the law very long at all to force through that door. The text of the decision says:
The available precedent persuades us that the word “person,” as used in the Fourteenth Amendment, does not include the unborn. […] If this suggestion of personhood is established, the appellant’s case, of course, collapses, for the fetus’ right to life would then be guaranteed specifically by the Amendment.
And unsurprisingly, in 1989 with Webster v. Reproductive Health Services the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of language in a Missouri statute that asserts that “the life of each humanbeing begins at conception” and “unborn children have protectable interests in life, health, and wellbeing.” The law being upheld required that all Missouri state laws be interpreted to provide unborn children with rights equal to those enjoyed by other persons – which effectively revokes legal personhood from pregnant women. This ruling set the stage for the several personhood law attempts we’ve seen recently. The first of these was passed into law in North Dakota and is now viable precedent. The door to criminalization left open by Roe has been effectively blown off its hinges.
The logical conclusion of codifying fetal personhood into law is that women are being criminally prosecuted when their pregnancies do not end in live birth. Over the last few years we’ve seen women in the US brought up on charges that they somehow caused their miscarriages. Bills criminalizing miscarriage have been proposed in several states, and in some, the courts have acted on them. In 2009 Nina Buckhalter was indicted by a grand jury in Lamar County, Mississippi, for manslaughter, claiming that the then 29 year old woman “did willfully, unlawfully, feloniously, kill Hayley Jade Buckhalter, a human being, by culpable negligence.” This was after Nina had a stillbirth at 31 weeks. The National Association for Pregnant Women has documented more than 400 cases across the country in which these laws have been used to detain or jail pregnant women for supposedly endangering their pregnancies. 71 percent of these are, unsurprisingly, likely to be low income women.
Instead of granting women the right to obtain an abortion, Roe v. Wade affirmed the right of the medical industry and government to make decisions for women. Instead of providing women with the opportunity to access abortion, Roe v. Wade affirmed that abortion is a privilege only afforded to a lucky, monied few. Instead of moving the fight for Reproductive Justice forward, Roe v. Wade conceded most of the ground that pre-Roe activists were fighting for. To top it all off, Roe includes a specific directive on personhood that has paved the way for those who would love to see abortion eradicated. Why are we surprised that things have become steadily worse since Roe was decided? Why have we let ourselves forget what actual reproductive autonomy even looks like? Next year on Roe’s anniversary, and the whole year in between, let’s stop being satisfied with weak reforms that simply reinforce the status quo. Let’s take a hard, honest look at what is at stake when we laud Roe for what it can’t do and completely forget what it has done – the good and the bad.
Notes
[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/cecile-richards/roe-v-wade-38-and-under-a_b_812531.html
[2] http://thequakercampus.com/2013/02/07/students-and-faculty-reflect-over-roe-v-wade-40th-anniversary/
[3] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alex-stern/sterilization-california-prisons_b_3631287.html
[4] http://horatiostorer.net/AMA_vs_Abortion.html
[5] http://books.google.com/books?id=iQN0NsOUBGsC&pg=PA100&lpg=PA100&dq=ama+frightful+extent+of+abortion&source=bl&ots=ubgMYfYhDW&sig=1rkvS7-OezSXB7BLEQckdAzg_rA&hl=en&sa=X&ei=0IXhUpvmB9GCogTxuoLgCg&ved=0CEgQ6AEwBA#v=onepage&q=ama%20frightful%20extent%20of%20abortion&f=false
Photo by Aiden Frazier on Unsplash
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Jul 14, 2012 | Colonialism & Conquest, Indigenous Autonomy, Male Violence, Prostitution, Rape Culture
By Cyril Mychalejko / Toward Freedom
One generally overlooked feature of the Guatemalan government and military’s 36-year (1960-96) genocidal counterinsurgency campaign against the country’s Mayan population is the strategy of targeting women with violence.
Rape, mutilation, sexual slavery, forced abortion, and sterilizations were just some of the sadistic tools used in a systematic practice of state-sponsored terror to crush the surviving population into submission through fear and shame via the suffering of their mothers, sisters, and daughters.
In 1999, UN-backed truth commission, the Commission for Historical Clarification (CEH), declared that during the war, “the rape of women, during torture or before being murdered, was a common practice aimed at destroying one of the most intimate and vulnerable aspects of the individual’s dignity…[and] they were killed, tortured and raped, sometimes because of their ideals and political or social participation…”
Glen Kuecker, professor of Latin American History at DePauw University, said that the gender specific violence was and continues to be part of the government’s counterinsurgency program aimed to destroy the fundamental social fabric of Mayan communities.
“The goal of counterinsurgency is to undermine the cohesion of a community that is needed for resistance,” said Kuecker. “Gender violence not only terrorizes women in the community, but it also disrupts traditional patriarchal gender relations by sending the message to men that they are not capable of protecting women.”
According to Emily Willard, Research Associate for the Evidence Project of The National Security Archive writing in Peace and Conflict Monitor this April, “The military’s strategies of targeting women reached such a large portion of the male population, normalizing rape and violence against women. The residual effect of these genocidal policies and strategies can be seen in the rate and type of violence in Guatemala today.”
In 2010, 685 women were assassinated in Guatemala, compared to 213 in 2000. And while there were more than 40,000 complaints of violence against women filed with the Guatemalan Public Ministry, only 1 percent of those registered by the Judicial Department resulted in sentencing, according to a report published June 1 by the Nobel Women’s Initiative and the Just Associates (JASS), “Caught in the Crossfire: Women on the frontlines in Mexico, Honduras, and Guatemala.”
The report, co-authored by Nobel Peace Laureates Rigoberta Menchú Tum and Jody Williams, was the result of a fact-finding mission led by them in January 2012 to investigate violence against women in these three countries.
In Guatemala, the report singles out the civil war’s legacy of violence and impunity, the increased militarization resulting from the War on Drugs, land and resource conflicts, and the influence of foreign governments and businesses – specifically from the United States and Canada – as major contributing factors to the ongoing violence directed at women, and the targeting of women as a tactical and deliberate tool of political repression. The report states that the phenomenon of femicide has “reached crisis dimensions.”
Guatemala’s Civil War: No Justice, No Peace
“The crises in Guatemala are not internal crises,” Grahame Russell, co-director of Rights Action, a community development and anti-mining solidarity organization, told Toward Freedom. “They are global struggles.”
Guatemala’s Civil War serves as a perfect example. Former U.S. President Bill Clinton, in an uncharacteristic moment of historical honesty, apologized to the Guatemalan people back in 1998 for the U.S.’s role in overthrowing democracy in the country and contributing political, military, and financial support to genocidal counterinsurgency programs which successive dictators carried out on the Mayan population.
“It is important that I state clearly that support for military forces or intelligence units which engaged in violent and widespread repression…was wrong,” said Clinton.
The war left over 200,000, mostly indigenous civilians, murdered, while tens of thousands were raped, tortured, disappeared and displaced. But in the wake of the war, as many as an estimated 98 percent of those responsible for war crimes and genocide (both Guatemalan and American) remain free.
“In Guatemala, the surge in femicides demonstrates that peace is not just the cessation of war,” the JASS report states. “The lack of justice for crimes of the 1980s has left victims without redress, and culprits in power.” Amnesty International noted that in the last 10 years as many as 5,700 women have been murdered.
The position of recently elected president Otto Perez Molina that there was no genocide in the country is a perfect illustration of how impunity persists. However, Perez Molina, a former general and CIA asset who was trained at the infamous School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia, is taking a position that is self-serving, not just racist and revisionist. He led a military battalion in the early 1980s in the country’s northwestern highlands where some of the bloodiest massacres occurred. In addition, as Annie Bird, journalist and co-director of Rights Action pointed out in a profile of the president this year, Perez Molina ran a “secret torture center” for political prisoners while serving as head of the country’s military intelligence in 1994. One of Perez Molina’s past bosses, former dictator Efrain Rios Montt, unleashed a scorched earth campaign against the country’s Mayan population between 1982-83, wiping out entire villages in the process. Thirty years later Rios Montt, who was a very close ally of former U.S. President Ronald Reagan, is just now standing trial, and is accused of being responsible for “1,771 deaths, 1,400 human rights violations and the displacement of 29,000 indigenous Guatemalans.”
Sandra Moran, a Guatemalan feminist, lesbian, artist and activist working on women’s rights and human rights in Guatemala City, is a member and co-founder of Colectivo Artesana and Alianza Politica Sector de Mujeres. She lived in exile in Canada for 14 years after participating in the country’s student movement in the early 1980s. After working tirelessly abroad to build transnational solidarity, Moran returned to Guatemala to participate in the Peace Process and to help rebuild a more peaceful, just and humane country.
“During the war it was State Policy to target the bodies of women as part of the government’s ‘Counterinsurgency Plan’. Although the war ended, this violence against women has continued,” Moran told Toward Freedom. Her office has been targeted and broken into in the past, with spilt blood left, and she has received numerous death threats as a result of her work. “The way some murdered and mutilated bodies have appeared [in recent years] are the same way they appeared during the war,” added Moran.
Amnesty International submitted a briefing on Guatemala to the UN’s Human Rights Committee in March, voicing concern how “female victims often suffer exceptional brutality before being killed, including rape, mutilation and dismemberment.”
Moran added that these misogynistic forms of violence and torture are social problems that have been taught at both institutional and individual levels. Many of the teachers of this violence are working with the government, military and police, and are often those same people who committed these types of crimes during the war. Moran also singled out the heads of private security industry, which according to the JASS report, has ballooned to an estimated 28,000 legal and 50,000 unregistered private security agents in the country.
In 2007 Amnesty International issued a report noting the presence of “clandestine groups” in the country, comprised of the “the business sector, private security companies, common criminals, gang members and possibly ex and current members of the armed forces,” who were then, and continue to target human rights activists in order to maintain impunity and an unjust and patriarchal social order.
“Guatemala’s peace-making process never moved into a necessary peace-building process that could assure strong institutions and practices,” the JASS report states. “The government typically fails to conduct investigations or prosecute the perpetrators of women’s murders.”
The Guatemalan government’s embrace of ex-war criminals and current criminals, combined with the support of international political and business actors, sustains what Rights Action’s Russell calls, “an unjust, racist, and violent social order” and “maintaining business as usual and politics as usual.”
Business as Usual
In 1954 the CIA, at the behest of United Fruit Company, coordinated the coup which overthrew democratically-elected president Jacobo Arbenz Guzman. Reasons behind this act include the fact that he rewrote the country’s labor code and initiated land reforms, acts deemed unacceptable by United Fruit Company and Washington. The idea of Guatemala being solely a source of cheap labor and a place to extract resources with low costs and even lower oversight has been a continuum in the country’s history. The lack of justice and weak governance appears to be seen as a comparative advantage for the country. For example, Amnesty International, in its briefing to the UN this past March, also pointed out how “[t]he failings of the state continue to be relied on by companies, in particular mining companies, who prefer the lower national standard to international human rights standards.”
One example the JASS report points out is Perez Molina’s refusal to respect the 55 community consultations held throughout the country in indigenous communities, which overwhelmingly rejected so-called development projects involving mining, oil and hydroelectric dams. According to ILO Convention 169, the international law which Guatemala is a signatory of, indigenous communities must provide free, prior, and informed consent to any projects that would impact their land and communities. Other “failings of the state” include the refusal to investigate and prosecute those responsible for violence against activists who challenge the status quo by demanding that their human rights, such as those enshrined under ILO 169, are recognized and honored.
The JASS delegation led by Menchu and Williams listened to testimony from women who shared stories about the violence during the war and the violence associated with what might be described now as low intensity conflicts surrounding land and resources. Their report stated, “They described that today’s intent is subtler: to force communities out of areas where mineral and other types of resources are coveted. But the methods are very similar: rape, murder, imprisonment, division and harassment…Women presented testimonies and evidence of many cases where army and private security presence is associated with putting down local protests against mining operations and other development projects that displace and disrupt communities to exploit natural resources.”
Less than two weeks after the report was released, Yolanda Oqueli Veliz, a community leader from the municipalities of San Jose del Golfo and San Pedro Ayampuc working against the widely unpopular Canadian gold mining project owned by Radius Gold, was shot by assassins and is now in the hospital in critical condition.
While criticism of the Guatemalan State is necessary and warranted, the Canadian government deserves the same treatment. Lawmakers in Ottawa have consistently aided and abetted such behavior by their industry due to what at best could be considered indifference, but is more likely a deliberate disregard for the human rights and environmental rights of communities affected by Canadian mining companies.
A perfect illustration of this was the failure to pass Bill C-300, a modest, if not flawed piece of legislation, which would have empowered the Canadian government to investigate human rights complaints and strip guilty companies from taxpayer subsidies through the Canadian Pension Plan and Export Development Canada. Apparently murder and gang-rapes linked to Canadian mining projects in Guatemala (not to mention similar acts throughout the hemisphere and around the globe) are not enough to encourage lawmakers in Canada to pass legislation that would hold their country’s companies accountable for these crimes and human rights abuses.
While women are being targeted for their social justice leadership roles in these conflicts, it is modest progress in the realm of rights and empowerment that has allowed women to assume such roles.
“Since the war ended women’s leadership in their communities and with community struggles have increased. More and more women have realized that they have rights and that they must defend their rights. And this is part of the reason why violence against women has increased,” said Moran. “An act of violence against a woman is not just an act against the individual, but against all women. It is a message that if you leave your house, if you continue to organize or raise your voice, that this can happen to you.”
Read more from Upside Down World: http://upsidedownworld.org/main/guatemala-archives-33/3755-guatemalan-femicide-the-legacy-of-repression-and-injustice-
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Jul 7, 2012 | Agriculture, Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction, Climate Change, Mining & Drilling, Strategy & Analysis, Toxification
By Derrick Jensen, for Orion Magazine
There isn’t a chance in hell that something like the original Wilderness Act could be passed today. Environmentalists today are too much on the defensive. Sure, there have been green platforms and policy papers, but nothing I’ve read matches the urgency of this moment. So I decided to draft a declaration. It goes like this:
We, the citizens of the United States of America, hold these truths to be self-evident: that a rapid decline in living conditions is taking place all around us; that compromise is no longer an adequate way forward (and perhaps never was); that more drastic measures must be taken immediately in order to preserve a livable planet. From these beliefs springs the following list of demands:
We demand that the United States Constitution be rewritten to explicitly prohibit the privatization of profits and the externalization of costs by the wealthy, and to immediately grant both human and nonhuman communities full legal and moral rights. Corporations should no longer be considered persons under the law. Limited liability corporations must be immediately stripped of their limited liability protection. Those whose economic activities cause great harm—including great harm to the real, physical world—should be punished. Environmental Crimes Tribunals must be immediately put in place to try those who have significantly harmed the real, physical world. These tribunals should have the force of law and should be expected to impose punishment commensurate with the harm caused to the public and to the planet.
We demand the immediate, explicit, and legally binding recognition that perpetual growth is incompatible with life on a finite planet. Economic growth must stop, and economies must begin to contract. We demand acknowledgment that if we don’t begin this contraction voluntarily, it will take place against our will, and will cause untold misery.
We demand that overconsumption and overpopulation be addressed through bold and serious measures, but not by approaches that are racist, colonialist, or misogynist. Right now, more than 50 percent of the children who are born into this world are unwanted. We demand that all children be wanted. The single most effective strategy for making certain that all children are wanted is the liberation of women. Therefore we demand that women be given absolute economic, sexual, and reproductive freedom, and that all forms of reproductive control become freely available to all.
There is consensus among the scientific community that in order to prevent catastrophic climate change beyond what the industrial economy has already set in motion, net carbon emissions must be reduced by 80 percent as soon as possible. Because we wish to continue to live on a habitable planet, we demand a carbon reduction of 20 percent of current emissions per year over the next four years.
Dwayne Andreas, former CEO of Archer Daniels Midland, has said, “There isn’t one grain of anything in the world that is sold in a free market. Not one! The only place you see a free market is in the speeches of politicians.” He’s right. Capitalism is based almost entirely on subsidies. For example, commercial fishing fleets worldwide receive more in subsidies than the entire value of their catch. Timber corporations, oil corporations, banks—all would collapse immediately without massive government subsidies and bailouts. Therefore, we demand that the United States government stop subsidizing environmentally and socially destructive activities, and shift those same subsidies into activities that restore biotic communities and that promote local self-sufficiency and vibrant local economies.
We demand an immediate and permanent halt to all extractive and destructive activities: fracking, mountaintop removal, tar sands production, nuclear power, and offshore drilling chief among them. The list of activities to be halted must also include the manufacture of photovoltaic panels, windmills, hybrid cars, and so on. We must find nondestructive ways of becoming a sustainable society.
We demand an immediate end to monocrop agriculture, one of the most destructive activities humans have ever perpetrated. All remaining native forests must be immediately and completely protected. We demand an end to clearcutting, “leave tree,” “seed tree,” “shelter tree,” and all other “even-aged management” techniques, no matter what they are called, and no matter what rationales are put forward by the timber industry and the government to justify them. Likewise, we demand that all remaining prairies and wetlands be permanently protected.
Further, we demand that all damaged lands be restored, from the redwood forest to the Gulf Stream waters. Because soil is the basis of terrestrial life, no activities should be allowed that destroy topsoil. All properties over sixty acres must have soil surveys performed every ten years, and if they have suffered any decrease in health or depth of topsoil, the lands shall be confiscated and ownership transferred to those who will build up soil.
We demand that no activities that draw down aquifers be allowed, and that all polluted or compromised rivers and wetlands be restored. There are more than 2 million dams in the United States, more than 60,000 dams over thirteen feet tall and more than 70,000 dams over six and a half feet tall. If we removed one of these 70,000 dams each day, it would take 200 years to get rid of them all. Salmon don’t have that much time. Sturgeon don’t have that much time. Therefore, we demand that no more dams be built, and we demand the removal of five dams per day over the next forty years, beginning one year from today.
We demand that the United States make an annual survey of all endangered species to ascertain if they are increasing in number and range, and if they are not, we demand that steps be taken to make sure that they do. The U.S. government must be charged with the task of doing whatever is necessary to make sure that there are more migratory songbirds every year than the year before, that there are more native fish every year than the year before, more native reptiles and amphibians.
The United States must immediately withdraw from NAFTA, DR-CAFTA, and other so-called free trade agreements, because these agreements cause immeasurable and irreparable harm to working people, local economies. Likewise, we demand that the United States remove all support for the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, because these organizations promote and support vast infrastructure projects such as highways, dams, thermal power projects, and mines that disrupt or destroy entire biomes and dispossess and immiserate hundreds of thousands of people (in India alone, 50 million people have been displaced by large “development” projects).
From this day forward, the only conditions under which the United States of America should go to war is by a direct vote of more than 50 percent of U.S. citizens. Furthermore, we demand immediate closure of all U.S. military bases on foreign soil. All U.S. military personnel should be brought home within two years. The U.S. military budget must be reduced by 20 percent per year, until it reaches 20 percent of its current size. This will provide the “peace dividend” politicians promised us back when the Soviet Union collapsed, will balance the U.S. budget, and will more than pay for all necessary domestic programs, starting with biome repair and including food, shelter, and medical care for all.
In addition to the aforementioned, we demand that the U.S. government itself undergo a significant transformation in recognition of the fact that it can only be of, by, and for the people if it is concurrently of, by, and for the earth. And no, the fact that the animals and plants and natural communities don’t speak English is not a valid excuse for failing to provide for their well-being.
Once these demands have been met, we will come up with more, and then more, until we are living in a sane, just, and sustainable culture. We believe that such a culture is our birthright, both as human beings with inalienable rights and as animals who love our home. We have not forgotten that the Declaration of Independence states that when a government becomes destructive of our rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, then it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it.
From Orion Magazine: http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/6916
