For the past two months, approximately 800 Orang Asli Indigenous Peoples have maintained blockades at several sites in Gua Musang district, Kelantan State, Malaysia in defense of the environment and their customary rights over land.
“We want to block any activity that would destroy the environment”, said the Chairperson of the Kelantan Orang Asli Village Network, Mustafa Along, in a video interview conducted by the environmental organization Sahabat Alam Malaysia (SAM, Friends of the Earth Malaysia), which SAM shared with Real World Radio. Mustafa explained that Indigenous Peoples depend on forests and when these ecosystems are destroyed, the lives of the communities are directly impacted. “We will continue to blockade as long as the (Kelantan) State government remains silent and does not give a decision”, stated Mustafa.
SAM issued a press release on March 1st where they warn that several business activities on the Orang Asli’s lands are affecting their watersheds, settlements, cemeteries and forest produce, among other things.
The protest measure by the Indigenous Peoples aims to stop forest exploitation, mining and large-scale monoculture plantations in the lands that belong to communities through their customary rights. But they also aim to raise awareness about their struggle and the impacts of forest destruction around the world, not only indigenous communities.
“We are facing many problems now as a result of the forests being destroyed, including global warming. This is not just an Orang Asli issue, it’s a problem that affects the rest of the world too. We hope our little effort would raise awareness on this issue and everyone would join our struggle”, added Mustafa in the interview with SAM.
The environmental organization denounces in its press release that Kelantan authorities have been approving logging activities, monoculture plantation projects, land-use conversion to agriculture and mining in the Permanent Reserved Forests (PRF) (a Malaysian category for forests), without respecting the customary rights of Indigenous Peoples.
SAM states that land-use conversion in PRFs does not only destroy the original forest cover (natural forests) through the clear-felling harvesting method, affecting forest biodiversity, but it also affects the rights and lives of the Orang Asli in particular.
“Sahabat Alam Malaysia is disappointed with the Kelantan state authorities which did not consider the recommendations that SAM and the Orang Asli community had submitted in the past”, states the press release issued by the Malaysian organization, a member of environmental federation Friends of the Earth International, present in 75 countries.
The press release also makes reference to several moments where SAM, and in other cases a representative of the Orang Asli people, have submitted their feedback or suggestions to the state government aiming to stop the development of monoculture plantations or mining projects in PRFs, but without any luck. On the contrary, the Kelantan state government “is still pursuing the implementation of large-scale monoculture plantation projects in the PRF area”, reads the statement.
Nevertheless, SAM insists on their request to State authorities to stop the conversion of these forests into mining or monoculture plantation areas. They also demand the State to not allow logging in forested areas above 1,000 meters and that they ensure that the indigenous customary rights over land are respected.
Blockade in kg kuala wok gua musang. Photo: SAM – Friends of the Earth Malaysia
“SAM is concerned that if the above-mentioned recommendations are not implemented, more serious environmental impacts such as floods, sedimentation and pollution of rivers, loss of biodiversity, flora and wildlife will occur. The lives and livelihoods of these indigenous people who depend on natural resources will be further marginalized”, states SAM in the press release.
Meanwhile, Mustafa demanded the Kelantan government to stop logging, mining activities and monoculture plantations in their lands. “We hope that the State government would find other sources of income instead of logging”, he stated in the interview with SAM. “We hope that the public would support us in defending our remaining forests. It would be a difficult task if we (Orang Asli) are the only ones in this struggle to defend our forests. We feel that we need as much help as possible from those who can help us”, added the Chairperson of the Kelantan Orang Asli Village Network.
This article was first published at Real World Radio. It has been edited for clarity by Intercontinental Cry, and republished under a Creative Commons license.
The alternative culture of the ’60s offered a generalized revolt against structure, responsibility, and morals. Being a youth culture, and following out of the Bohemian and the Beatniks, this was predictable. But a rejection of all structure and responsibility ends ultimately in atomized individuals motivated only by self interests, which looks rather exactly like capitalism’s fabled Economic Man. And a flat out refusal of the concept of morality is the province of sociopaths. This is not a plan with a future.
Take the pull of the alternative culture across the left. Now add the ugliness and the authoritarianism of the right’s “family values.” It’s no surprise that the left has ceded all claim to morality. But it’s also a mistake. We have values, too. War is a moral issue. Poverty is a moral issue. Two hundred species driven extinct every day is a moral issue. Underneath every instance of injustice is a violation of what we know is right. Unrestricted personal license in a context that abandons morals to celebrate outrage will not inspire a movement for justice, nor will it build a culture worth living in. It will grant the powerful more entitlements—for instance, the rich will get richer, and the poor will be conceptually nonexistent, except as a resource. “If it feels good, do it” isn’t even the province of adolescence; it’s the morality of a toddler. For the entitled individual, in whatever version—Homo economicus, Homo bohemicus, or Homo sadeus—pleasure is reduced to cheap thrills, while the deepest human joys—intimacy, belonging, participation from community to cosmos—are impossible. This is because those joys depend on a realization that we need other people and other beings, ultimately a whole web of existence, all of whom deserve our protection and respect. In return we get rewards, rewards that can accrue into profound satisfaction: from the contented joy of communal well-being to the animal ecstasy of sex to the grace of participation in the mystery.
Currently, the right places the blame for the destruction of both family and community at the feet of liberalism. The real culprit, of course, is capitalism, especially the corporate and mass media versions. But as long as the left refuses to fight for our values as values—and to enact those values in our lives and our movements—the right will be partially correct. They will also have recruitment potential that we’re squandering: people know that civic life and basic social norms have degenerated.
It is a triumph for capitalism that the right is winning the US culture war by pinning this decay of family and community on the left. But the right is willing to take a moral stance, even though the man behind the curtain isn’t Sodom or Gomorrah, it’s corporate capitalism. Meanwhile the left might identify capitalism as the problem, but by and large refuses a moral stance.
The US is dominated by corporate rule. The Democrats and Republicans are really the two wings of the Capitalist Party. Neither is going to critique the masters. It is up to us, the people who hold human rights and our living planet dear above all things, to speak the truth. We need to rise above individualism and live in the knowledge that we are the only people who are going to defend what is good in human possibility against the destructive overlapping power-grab of capitalism, patriarchy, and industrialization.
We can begin by picking up the pieces of community and civic life in the US. People of my parent’s generation are correct to mourn the loss of the community trust and participation that they once experienced. And as Robert Putnam makes clear in his book on the subject, Bowling Alone, social trust is linked to both civic and political participation in ways that are mutually reinforcing—or mutually reducing. My mother and her friends have the addresses of their state and federal congress-people memorized. Twenty years behind them, I at least know their names. And the current college-aged generation? They explain earnestly how the government works: “The President tells Congress what to do, and Congress tells the Supreme Court what to do.” In two generations, there goes every advance since Magna Carta.
We’re getting stupider, crueler, and more depressed by the minute. Oliver James calls the values of the corporate media “Affluenza,” likening it to a virus that spreads across societies. He points out that anxiety, depression, and addiction rise in direct proportion to the inequity in a country. The values required to institutionalize inequality are values that are destructive to human happiness and human community. Injustice requires reducing people—including ourselves—to “manipulable commodities.”74 James writes, “Intimacy is destroyed if you regard another person as an object to be manipulated to serve your ends, whether at work or at play.… This leaves you feeling lonely and craving emotional contact, vulnerable to depression.”75
How did this happen? When did people stop caring? One insight of Marxist cultural theorists like Antonio Gramsci is that in order for oppression to function smoothly, ideology must be transferred from the oppressors to the oppressed. They can’t stand over us all with guns twenty-four hours a day. This transfer must be consensual and actively embraced to work on a society-wide scale. If the dominant class can make the ideology pleasurable, so much the better. Nothing could have done the job better than the passivity-inducing, addictive, and isolating technologies of first television and then the Internet.
Corporations have managed to coerce a huge percentage of the population into abandoning the values and behaviors that make people happy—to act against our own interests by instilling in us a new mythos and a set of compulsive behaviors. There is no question that television and other mass media are addictive, leading to “habituation, desensitization, satiation, and an increasing level of arousal … required to maintain satisfaction.”76 Clearly, there is an intense short-term pleasure capturing people, because the long-term losses are tremendous. Literally thousands of studies have documented television’s damage to children; indeed, a coalition of professional groups, including the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics, put out a joint report in 2000 declaring media violence a serious public health issue to children, with effects that are “measurable and long-lasting.”77 The American Academy of Pediatrics reports, “Extensive research evidence indicates that media violence can contribute to aggressive behavior, desensitization to violence, nightmares, and fear of being harmed.”78 The most chilling studies link television to teen depression, eating disorders, and suicide. If the destruction of our young isn’t enough to get us to fight back, what will be? As a culture, we are actively handing over the young to be socialized by corporate America in a set of values that are essentially amoral. The average child will spend 2,000 hours with her parents and 40,000 hours with the mass media. Why even bother to have children?
If culture is a set of stories we collectively tell, the stories have now been reduced to the sound bites of profit, offered up in a tantalizing, addictive flash that barricades access to our selves, if not our souls. Writes Maggie Jackson, “The way we live is eroding our capacity for deep, sustained, perceptive attention—the building blocks of intimacy, wisdom, and cultural progress.”79 For the young, those barricades may be permanent. Children need to experience bonding or they will end up with personality disorders, living as narcissists, borderlines, and sociopaths. They must learn basic values like compassion, generosity, and duty to become functioning members of society. They must have brains that can learn, contemplate, and question in order to have both a rich internal life and to have something to offer as participants in a democracy. For the developing child, bonding, values, and expectations create neurologic patterns that last a lifetime. Their absence leaves voids that can never be filled. The brain gets one opportunity to build itself, and only one.
The job of a parent is to socialize the young. Until recently, parents and children were nestled inside a larger social system with the same basic values taught at home. Now, parents are being told to “protect” their kids from the culture at large—a task that cannot be done. Society is where we all live, unless you want to move to Antarctica. Even if you managed to keep the worst excesses of consumerist, violent, and misogynist elements out of your child’s immediate environment, the child still has to leave the house. If the culture is so toxic that we can’t entrust our children to it, we need to change the culture.
The values taught by the mass media encourage the worst in human beings. If people are objects, neither intimacy nor community are possible. If image is all we are, we will always need to be on display. Social invisibility is a kind of death to social creatures. We buy more and more, whether higher-status cars or lower-cut jeans, so that we can have a better shot at being noticed as the object du jour. People surrounded by a culture of mass images experience themselves and the world as depersonalized, distant, and fractured. This is the psychological profile of PTSD. Add to that the sexual objectification and degradation of those images, and you have girls presenting with PTSD symptoms with no history of abuse.80The culture itself has become the perpetrator.
Yes, we can try to inoculate ourselves and our children against the mass media, both its messages and its processes. But why should anyone need to be protected from the culture in which they live? And what good are all your heartfelt conversations and empowering feminist fairy tales when your girl child is surrounded by people who are not fans of Gaia Girls, but Girls Gone Wild?
As Pat Murphy bravely writes,
Suggesting that media is in general harmful and should be eliminated (or a dramatic reduction in the time spent imbibing it) at first seems absurd. But it is no more absurd than suggesting the age of oil and other fossil fuels is over. Media, energy and corporate control have evolved together. We need different concepts and new world views to transition away from fossil fuels and its infrastructure of corporations (including those of the media).81
Again, the right does not have a monopoly on values. We can reject authoritarianism, conformity, social hierarchy, anti-intellectualism, and religious fundamentalism. We can defend equality, justice, compassion, intellectual engagement, civic responsibility, and even love against the corporate jihad. We have to.
This day began as a commemoration of Chicago workers’ fight for the 8 hour work day and the right to organize.
In Haiti, workers are still battling for these essential rights.
Haitian garment workers receive the lowest wage in the western hemisphere – 350 Gourdes, or US $5.40.
Their wages are consumed just by the transportation costs of getting to and from work.
Most live in debt, and on the brink of hunger and homelessness.
Production quotas in factories are often set impossibly high. Factory owners and management do not respect the law, and often do not pay the minimum wage.
Union members and organizers are constantly harassed and arbitrarily fired for exercising their legal rights.
Batay Ouvriye (Workers Fight), is an independent workers’ movement in Haiti, with affiliated textile unions throughout Haiti – SOKOWA, SOVAGH & SOTA-BO.
For May Day, they are holding marches and activities across Haiti to bring attention to their fight.
They want a decent wage that allows them to feed, clothe, house and educate themselves and their families.
They want safe working conditions, free of harassment.
Editor’s note: This is the paper produced for a South African Student Organisation Leadership Training Course in December 1971.
by Steve Biko
We have defined blacks as those who are by law or tradition politically, economically and socially discriminated against as a group in the South African society and identifying themselves as a unit in the struggle towards the realization of their aspirations.
This definition illustrates to us a number of things:
Being black is not a matter of pigmentation–being black is a reflection of a mental attitude.
Merely by describing yourself as black you have started on a road towards emancipation, you have committed yourself to fight against all forces that seek to use your blackness as a stamp that marks you out as a subservient being.
From the above observations therefore, we can see that the term black is not necessarily all-inclusive, i.e. the fact that we are all not white does not necessarily mean that we are all black. Non-whites do exist and will continue to exist for quite a long time. If one’s aspiration is whiteness but his pigmentation makes attainment of this impossible, then that person is a non-white. Any man who calls a white man “baas,” any man who serves in the police force or security branch is ipso facto a non-white. Black people–real black people–are those who can manage to hold their heads high in defiance rather than willingly surrender their souls to the white man.
Briefly defined therefore, Black Consciousness is in essence the realization by the black man of the need to rally together with his brothers around the cause of their oppression–the blackness of their skin–and to operate as a group in order to rid themselves of the shackles that bind them to perpetual servitude. It seeks to demonstrate the lie that black is an aberration from the “normal” which is white. It is a manifestation of a new realization that by seeking to run away from themselves and to emulate the white man, black are insulting the intelligence of whoever created them black. Black Consciousness, therefore takes cognizance of the deliberateness of the God’s plan in creating black people black.
It seeks to infuse the black community with a new-found pride in themselves, their efforts, their value systems, their culture, their religion and their outlook to life. The interrelationship between the consciousness of the self and the emancipatory programme is of a paramount importance. Blacks no longer seek to reform the system because so doing implies acceptance of the major points around which the system revolves. Blacks are out to completely transform the system and to make of it what they wish. Such a major undertaking can only be realized in an atmosphere where people are convinced of the truth inherent in their stand. Liberation therefore is of paramount importance in the concept of Black Consciousness, for we cannot be conscious of ourselves and yet remain in bondage. We want to attain the envisioned self which is a free self.
The surge towards Black Consciousness is a phenomenon that has manifested itself throughout the so-called Third World. There is no doubt that discrimination against the black man the word over fetches its origin from the exploitative attitude of the white man. Colonization of white countries by whites has throughout history resulted in nothing more than sinister than mere cultural or geographical fusion at worst, or language bastardization at best.
It is true that the history of weaker nations is shaped by bigger nations, but nowhere in the world today do we see whites exploiting whites on scale even remotely similar to what is happening in South Africa. Hence, one is forced to conclude that it is not coincidence that black people are exploited. It was a deliberate plan which has culminated in even so-called black independent countries not attaining any real independence.
With this background in mind we are forced, therefore, to believe that it is a case of haves against have-nots where whites have been deliberately made haves and black have-nots.
There is for instance no worker in the classical sense among whites in South Africa, for even the most downtrodden white worker still has a lot lose if the system is changed. He is protected by several laws against competition at work from the majority. He has a vote and he uses it to return the Nationalist Government to power because he sees them as the only people who, through job reservation laws, are bent on looking after his interests against competition with the “Natives.”
It should therefore be accepted that analysis of our situation in terms of one’s colour at once takes care of the greatest single determinant for political action–i.e. colour–while also validly describing the blacks as the only real workers in South Africa. It immediately kills all suggestions that there could ever be effective rapport between the real workers, i.e. blacks, and the privileged white workers, since we have shown that the latter are the greatest supporters of the system.
True enough, the system has allowed so dangerous an anti-black attitude to build up amongst whites, who are economically nearest to the blacks, demonstrate the distance between themselves and the blacks by an exaggerated reactionary attitude towards blacks. Hence the greatest anti-black feeling is to be found amongst the very poor whites whom the Class Theory calls upon to be with black workers in the struggle for emancipation. This is the kind of twisted logic that Black Consciousness approach seeks to eradicate.
In terms of the Black Consciousness approach we recognize the existence of one major force in South Africa. This is White Racism. It is the one force against which all of us are pitted. It works with unnerving totality, featuring both on the offensive and in our defence. Its greatest ally to date has been the refusal by us to progressively lose ourselves in a world of colourlessness and amorphous common humanity, whites are deriving pleasure and security in entrenching white racism and further exploiting the minds and bodies of the unsuspecting black masses. Their agents are ever present amongst us, telling that it is immoral to withdraw into a cocoon, that dialogue is the answer to our problem and that it is unfortunate that there is white racism in some quarters but you must that things are changing.
These in fact are the greatest racists for they refuse to credit us any intelligence to know what we want. Their intentions are obvious; they want to be barometers by which the rest of the white society can measure feelings in the black world. This then is what makes us believe that white power presents itself as a totality not only provoking us but also controlling our response to the provocation. This is an important point to note because it is often missed by those who believe that there are a few good whites. Sure there are few good whites just as much as there are a few bad blacks.
However what we are concerned here with is group attitudes and group politics. The exception does not make a lie of a rule–it merely substantiates it. The overall analysis therefore, based on the Hegelian theory of dialectic materialism, is as follows. That since the thesis is a white racism there can only be one valid antithesis, i.e. a solid black unity, to counterbalance the scale. If South Africa is to be a land where black and white live together in harmony without fear of group exploitation, it is only when these two opposites have interplayed and produced a viable synthesis of ideas and modus vivendi. We can never wage any struggle without offering a strong counterpoint to the white racism that permeate our society so effectively.
One must immediately dispel the thought that Black Consciousness is merely a methodology or a means towards an end. What Black Consciousness seeks to do is to produce at the output end of the process real black people who do not regard themselves as the appendages to white society. This truth cannot be reserved.
We do not need to apologize for this because it is true that the white systems have produced throughout the world a number of people who are not aware that they too are people. Our adherence to values that we set for ourselves can also not be reversed because it will always be a lie to accept white values as necessarily the best. The fact that a synthesis may be attained only relates to adherence to power politics. Someone somewhere along the line will be forced to accept the truth and here we believe that ours is the truth.
The future of South Africa in the case where blacks adopt Black Consciousness is the subject for concern especially among initiates. What do we do when have attained our Consciousness ? Do we propose to kick whites out ? I believe personally that the answers to these questions ought to be found in the SASO Policy Manifesto and in our analysis of the situation in South Africa. We have defined what we mean by true integration and the very fact that such a definition exists does illustrate what our standpoint is. In any case we are much more concerned about what is happening now, than will happen in the future. The future will always be shaped by the sequence of present-day events.
The importance of black solidarity to the various segments of the black community must not be understated. There have been in the past a lot of suggestions that there can be no viable unity amongst blacks because they hold each other in contempt. Coloureds despise Africans because they (the former), by their proximity to the Africans, may lose the chances of assimilation into the white world. Africans despise the Coloureds and Indians for a variety of reasons. Indians not only despise Africans but in many instances also exploit the Africans in job and shop situations.
All these stereotype attitudes have led to mountainous inter-group suspicions amongst the blacks.
What we should at all times look at is the fact that:
We are all oppressed by the same system.
That we are oppressed to varying degrees is a deliberate design to stratify us not only socially but also in terms of the enemy’s aspirations.
Therefore it is to be expected that in terms of the enemy’s plan there must be this suspicion and that if we are committed to the problem of emancipation to the same degree it is part of our duty to bring to the black people the deliberateness of the enemy’s subjugation scheme.
That we should go on with our programme, attracting to it only committed people and not just those eager to see an equitable distribution of groups amongst our ranks. This is a game common amongst liberals. The one criterion that must govern all our action is commitment.
Further implications of Black Consciousness are to do with correcting false images of ourselves in terms of culture, Education, Religion, Economics. The importance of this also must not be understated. There is always an interplay between the history of people i.e. the past, their faith in themselves and hopes for their future. We are aware of the terrible role played by our education and religion in creating amongst us a false understanding of ourselves. We must therefore work out schemes not only to correct this, but further to be our own authorities rather than wait to be interpreted by others.
Whites can only see us from the outside and as such can never extract and analyze the ethos in the black community. In summary therefore one need only refer this house to the South African Student Organisation Policy Manifesto which carries most of the salient points in the definition of the Black Consciousness. I wish to stress again the need for us to know very clearly what we mean by certain terms and what our understanding is when we talk of Black Consciousness.
Featured image: Army personnel assigned to Bravo Company, 121st Combat Support Hospital, based out of Camp. When one cannot go to support an action directly, how can one still support that action?
Editor’s note: This is an edited transcript of Derrick Jensen’s talk, which you can view on Deep Green Video.
Napoleon, or maybe it was Frederick the Great, famously commented that an army marches on its stomach. The quartermasters are just as important as the soldiers. In World War II battles, only about 10% of the soldiers ever fired the gun in battle. Most soldiers were clerks, truck drivers, people who delivered munitions, medics, or cooks. That is a pretty common figure: about 10%, often less. Only about 3% of the IRA ever picked up weapons.
Consider a professional basketball or baseball team. You not only have the players; you’ve got all the minor leaguers, coaches, trainers, dietitians, people who sell tickets, and groundskeepers.
A movie does not just consist of Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman. There are gaffers and best boys and stunt people and editors and caterers. There are very few accomplishments that people actually do solo.
Most of us require support in whatever we are doing, and that support work is just as important as the more glorious aspects. My friend Lierre Keith often says that an activist movement needs two things: loyalty and material support.
For example, right now there are indigenous people and some non-indigenous supporters opposing a pipeline going across their land (of course every pipeline goes across indigenous land, but we’ll leave that aside for a moment). For those who, for any number of reasons, cannot be there physically, there are a near-infinite number of things they can do. They can write letters to the editor locally, they can advocate in one way or another for them, they can send them supplies. The people on the front lines still need to eat and they are going to have shoes that fall apart; they’re going to tear a hole in their jeans or they’re going to get sick.
When we were attempting to stop timber sales, we would sometimes have to work very hard to meet a deadline. We would have until midnight to finish our appeal. We would oftentimes be working as hard as we could for hours and hours on this thing; we’d only have two hours left to go and we were really hungry, so somebody had to go get some food. That‘s just as important as the person who drives to the post office, just as important as the person who writes it. Physical, material support is very important. You need to develop support among the people in order to have a guerrilla army. That’s also true of activism. We need to raise public support for our positions.
In “Second Person Experiment” researchers had a bunch of people sitting in a room and then have a couple of people come in. One person would, for example, say something very racist. (They wouldn’t believe it, they would just say it as part of the experiment.) They found that the response of everybody else in the room was very heavily influenced by the response of the second person.
Let’s say the first person says something really racist and the second person says, “Hey yeah, it’s pretty funny, that’s great.” Everybody else in the room is much more likely to respond positively, than if the second person says, “That’s not really very cool.” That just came up in a very small way this past week.
I’m on a neighborhood watch email list where they announce when somebody gets their house burgled or something. That’s pretty handy. But another thing that the people running the list do, which kind of annoys me, is they will complain every time anybody in the neighborhood sees a mountain lion or a bear. They will say, “We need to call Fish and Game and get rid of the animals, because the mountain lion was seen carrying a gray kitty.” They’ve been doing this a lot and I kept silent, but finally I just couldn’t take it anymore and wrote a very nice note: “We need to remember that we’re in their homes, and if you have a cat and you let the cat outside, that’s the risk you’re taking. The mountain lion or the bear should not be harmed because of a risk that you took and that your cat took (never mind that cats kill birds, we’ll leave that aside).” This is a very nice note, but it had to be said.
It‘s the same on the larger scale. The line by Gandhi, “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win” is awfully simplified, but it is really true that somebody has to go out and say something. And then somebody else has to repeat it again and again until it starts gaining a cultural currency.
In terms of the attempts to support the indigenous people opposing the pipeline, if they had 50,000 people show up, that would be great—but if that 50,000 people showed up and they had nobody show up with food, this 50,000-people-thing would last about six hours and leave a mess. You need the support in order to have a long-term campaign. That’s just as crucial as anything else.
I have a friend who is an accountant. As part of her activist work, she does accounting for various organizations. That’s something you have to do too, especially if you’re having a non-profit. You have to have somebody who can navigate that territory. I don’t care what your skills are. If you’re a good writer, they need writers; if you’re a good cook, they need good cooks; if you’re a good accountant, they need good accountants. I get so tired of being called the“violence guy” because I talk about resistance, but the truth is: We need everything. We need school teachers, we need accountants, we need cooks. We need everything.
I want to challenge everybody who’s reading this to take at least one hour every week and do some form of activism or support for somebody else’s activism. This is how I got started as an activist. When I was about 24, 25 or 26, I realized I wasn’t paying enough for gasoline. I wasn’t covering the social and economic costs. So every time I would buy gas, I was going to donate a dollar for every dollar I spent on gas to a local environmental organization. But I didn’t have any money because I was unemployed. So what I would do instead is give myself a choice: either pay a dollar for every dollar of gas, or pay myself five bucks an hour to do activism. If I spent ten bucks on gas, I would either give ten bucks to a local organization, or I would do two hours of activism.
I challenge everybody to do that: take some amount and either tithe $10 a week to some local organization, or do two hours of work for a local organization. I don’t care how busy you are, everybody can take one hour away from their life. Write a letter, go to a protest, help start assembling a package. You can do just that much to start. It’s a wonderful start.
Detroit, MI — Earlier this month, Siwatu-Salama Ra, Co-Director of the East Michigan Environmental Action Council (EMEAC), was sentenced to two years in prison for defending herself and her young child from an attacker. Siwatu is a member of the Sierra Club family, the daughter of Rhonda Anderson, a Sierra Club organizing manager in Detroit with nearly twenty years experience. Siwatu’s leadership at EMEAC has helped build community power through environmental justice education, youth development, and collaborative relationship building — and Siwatu has emerged as a national and international environmental justice leader, participating in numerous conferences like COP21 in Paris.
Siwatu is 26, the mother of a 3 year old, and is 7 months pregnant. She came into contact with the criminal justice system because of an incident in which an attacker threatened to strike Siwatu, her three-year-old daughter and her mother with a car. Siwatu showed her legal, permitted, unloaded handgun in an attempt to scare off the attacker, as allowed by Michigan’s Stand Your Ground law. She did not fire the unloaded gun and no one was harmed.
Siwatu was unjustly arrested, tried and convicted of felony gun charges and sentenced to two years in prison. She is now experiencing a high-risk pregnancy in prison, and could be forced to deliver her child while incarcerated.