Editor’s note: The following is from the chapter “Other Plans” of the book Deep Green Resistance: A Strategy to Save the Planet. This book is now available for free online.
Russia is a country with a negative population growth caused by “a collapse of the birth rate and a catastrophic surge in the death rate.”64 The country has a 0.6 percent population decrease, which means it will lose 22 percent of the population by 2050. That adds up to thirty million fewer people.65
One reason for the decline is that Russia has an extremely high involuntary infertility rate. Somewhere between 13 and 20 percent of married couples are infertile, and that number may be rising.66 For women, one of the main causes was a society-wide reliance on abortion as a form of birth control, abortions often done under substandard medical conditions. The literal scars of such procedures have left many women unable to conceive or carry to term. Sexually transmitted diseases are also a culprit—rates of syphilis are literally hundreds of times higher in Russia than in other European countries.67 Marriage rates have dropped and divorce rates risen, and 30 percent of Russia’s babies are being delivered to single mothers—this in a country too poor to offer public benefits. Women can’t afford to have more children.
Add to that a mortality rate that is “utterly breathtaking.”68 Tuberculosis, AIDS, alcoholism, and the disappearance of socialized medicine have pulled the numbers up. The main two causes of death, though, are cardiovascular disease (CVD), which in thirty-five years increased 25 percent for women and an astounding 65 percent for men, and injury. The increases in CVD is traceable to smoking, poor diet, sedentarism, and severe social stress. The injury category includes “murder, suicide, traffic, poisoning and other violent causes.”69 The violence is so bad that the death rate for injury and poisoning for Russian men is twelve times higher than for British men. And both CVD and the violence are helped along by vodka, which Russians drink at an extraordinary rate, equivalent to 125 cc “for everyone, every day.”70
Population in Russia is dropping dramatically without a cataclysmic event or a Pol Pot–styled genocide, which the authors of this book are often accused of suggesting. Though each individual death is its own world of tragedy, the deaths have not collectively brought daily life—or even the government—to a halt.
Russia may best illustrate the kind of slow decline of which Greer writes; and Russia’s disintegration is not even based on energy descent, as oil and gas are still abundant. The former USSR may give us good insights into people’s responses to economic decline, and how best to survive it, but as an example it does not address the conditions of biotic collapse that are our fundamental concern.
Except in one instance: Chernobyl. Ninety thousand square miles were contaminated with radiation; 350,000 people were displaced; and there is a permanent “exclusionary zone” encompassing a nineteen-mile radius and the ghosts of seventy-six towns.
But other ghosts have come back from the dead. Because despite the cesium-137 that’s deadly for 600 years and the strontium-90 that mammal bones mistake for calcium, Chernobyl has become a miracle of megafauna: the European bison have returned, as well as, somehow, the Przewalski’s horse. There are packs—that’s plural—of wolves. There are beavers coaxing back the lost wetlands. There are wild boar. There are European lynx. There are endangered birds like the black stork and the white-tailed eagle, glorious in their eight-foot wingspans. All this even though ten years after the accident, geneticists found small rodents with “an extraordinary amount of genetic damage.” They had a mutation rate “probably thousands of times greater than normal.”71 Yet twenty years after the accident, and with multiple excursions into the contaminated area, the same researcher, Dr. Robert Baker, said flat-out, “The benefit of excluding humans from this highly contaminated ecosystem appears to outweigh significantly any negative cost associated with Chernobyl radiation.”72 Witnessing the return of bison and wolves, who could say otherwise? Even a nuclear disaster is better for living creatures than civilization. And the real, if fledgling, hope: this planet, made not by some Lord God but instead by the work of all those creatures great and small, could repair herself if we would just stop destroying.
Bison in the Chernobyl exclusion zone
There are better ways to reduce our numbers than through alcoholism, syphilis, and nuclear accidents. We don’t need to wring our hands in helpless horror, stuck in a wrenching ethical dilemma between human rights and ecological drawdown. In fact, the most efficacious way to address the twin problems of population and resource depletion is by supporting human rights.
One of the great success stories of recent years is Iran. People’s desire for children turns out to be very malleable. Even in a context of religious fundamentalism, Iran was able to reduce its birthrate dramatically. In 1979, Ayatollah Khamenei dissolved Iran’s family planning efforts because he wanted soldiers for Islam to fight Iraq (and n.b. to those who still think they can be peace activists without being feminist). The population surged in response, reaching a 4.2 percent growth rate, which is the upper limit of what is biologically possible for humans. Iran went from 34 million people in 1979 to 63 million by 1998.73 Let’s be very clear about what this means for women. Girls as young as nine were legally handed over to adult men for sexual abuse: for me, the word “marriage” does not work as a euphemism for the raping of children.
The population surge proved to be a huge social burden immediately, and Iran’s leaders “realized that overcrowding, environmental degradation, and unemployment were undermining Iran’s future.”74 Health advocates, religious leaders, and community organizers held a summit to strategize.
They knew that free birth control was essential, but it wouldn’t be enough. All the major institutions of society had to get involved. Family planning policies were reinstituted and a broad public education effort was launched. Government ministries and the television company were brought into the project: soap operas took up the subject. Fifteen thousand rural clinics were founded and eighty mobile health care clinics brought birth control to remote areas. Thirty-five thousand family planning volunteers were trained to teach people in their neighborhoods about birth control options, and there were also workplace education campaigns. The government got religious leaders to proclaim that Allah wasn’t opposed to vasectomies; after that, vasectomies increased dramatically. In order to get a marriage license both halves of the couple had to attend a class on contraception. And new laws withdrew food subsidies and health care coverage after a couple’s third child, applying the stick as a backup to the carrots.
The biggest social initiative was to raise the status of women. Female literacy went from 25 percent in 1970 to over 70 percent in 2000. Ninety percent of girls now attend school.75
In seven years, Iran’s birthrate was sliced in half from seven children per woman to under three. So it can be done, and quickly, by doing the things we should be doing anyway. As Richard Stearns writes, “The single most significant thing that can be done to cure extreme poverty is this: protect, educate, and nurture girls and women and provide them with equal rights and opportunities—educationally, economically, and socially.… This one thing can do more to address extreme poverty than food, shelter, health care, economic development, or increased foreign assistance.”76
There is no reason for people who care about human rights to fear taking on this issue. Two things work to stop overpopulation: ending poverty and ending patriarchy. People are poor because the rich are stealing from them. And most women have no control over how men use our bodies. If the major institutions around the globe would put their efforts behind initiatives like Iran’s, there is still every hope that the world could turn toward both justice and sustainability.
Since Mexico privatized its oil and gas resources in 2013, border-crossing pipelines including those owned by Sempra Energy and TransCanada have come under intense scrutiny and legal challenges, particularly from Indigenous peoples.
Mexico is now facing its own Standing Rock-like moment as the Yaqui Tribe challenges Sempra Energy’s Agua Prieta pipeline between Arizona and the Mexican state of Senora. The Yaquis in the village of Loma de Bacum claim that the Mexican government has failed to consult with them adequately, as required by Mexican law.
Agua Prieta, slated to cross the Yaqui River, was given the OK by seven of eight Yaqui tribal communities. But the Yaquis based in Loma de Bacum have come out against the pipeline passing through their land, even going as far as chopping out a 25 foot section of pipe built across it.
“The Yaquis of Loma de Bacum say they were asked by community authorities in 2015 if they wanted a 9-mile tract of the pipeline running through their farmland — and said no. Construction went ahead anyway,” Bloomberg reported in a December 2017 story. “The project is now in a legal limbo. Ienova, the Sempra unit that operates the pipeline, is awaiting a judicial ruling that could allow them to go in and repair it — or require a costlier re-route.”
As the legal case plays out in the Supreme Court of Justice in Mexico, disagreements over the pipeline and its construction in Loma de Bacum have torn the community apart and even led to violence, according to Cimacnoticias.
Construction of the pipeline “has generated violence ranging from clashes between the community members themselves, to threats to Yaqui leaders and women of the same ethnic group, defenders of the Human Rights of indigenous peoples and of the land,” reported Cimacnoticias, according to a Spanish-to-English translation of its October 2016 story.
“They explained that there have been car fires and fights that have ended in homicide. Some women in the community have had to stay in places they consider safe, on the recommendation of the Yaquis authorities of the town of Bácum, because they have received threats after opposing signing the collective permit for the construction of the pipeline.”
TransCanada’s Troubles Cross Another Border
While best known for the Canada-to-U.S. Keystone XL pipeline and the years-long fight to build that proposed tar sands line, the Alberta-based TransCanada has also faced permitting issues in Mexico for its proposed U.S.-to-Mexico gas pipelines.
According to a December 2017 story published in Natural Gas Intelligence, TransCanada’s proposed Tuxpan-Tula pipeline is facing opposition from the indigenous Otomi community living in the Mexican state of Puebla. With Tuxpan-Tula, TransCanada hopes to send natural gas from Texas to Mexico via an underwater pipeline named the Sur de Texas-Tuxpan pipeline into the western part of the country.
The Otomi community recently won a successful bid in Mexican district court to stop construction of Tuxpan-Tula.
“At a recent hearing on an indoor soccer court at the foot of Cerro del Brujo, or Shaman’s Hill, in the southern Mexican state of Puebla, a district judge sided with an indigenous community and ordered construction” of the pipeline to halt, Natural Gas Intelligence reported. “[T]he court made the order in response to pleas from the local Otomi indigenous community, which claims that the construction would disturb sacred ground.”
Energy sector privatization in Mexico, decried by the country’s left-wing political parties and leading 2018 presidential contender Andrés Manuel López Obrador, has actually opened up the sort of legal opportunities that the Otomi have pursued in court.
“What is new in Mexico is the requirement that indigenous communities should be consulted,” Ramses Pech, CEO of the energy analysis group Caraiva y Asociados, told Natural Gas Intelligence. “That kind of consultation has long been a part of any project in the U.S. and other countries, but not so here. It was obviously needed in Mexico, too, but it has added to the complexities of the Mexican legal system in areas such as land and rights of way.”
In the U.S., the tribal consultation process is governed by the National Historic Preservation Act’s Section 106. That law gave the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe standing to sue U.S. government agencies, though ultimately unsuccessfully, for what the tribe alleged were violations which took place during the inter-agency permitting process.
Editor’s note: This is an edited transcript of Derrick Jensen’s March 2, 2014 Resistance Radio interview with David Zirin. Zirin writes about the politics of sports for The Nation and many other magazines and newspapers. He is the author or co-author of six books, including What’s My Name, Fool? Sports and Resistance in the United States, and Game Over: How Politics Has Turned the Sports World Upside Down.
Browse all episodes of Resistance Radio or listen to audio of this interview:
Derrick Jensen: How did you find your niche?
Dave Zirin: I grew up a very serious, intense, over-enthused sports fan in New York City in the 1980s. It was a pretty high octane sports time and not just because all of the players were doing cocaine. I didn’t think about politics a great deal during my upbringing, but that changed deal in the 1990s as I was coming of age. I made a real effort to try to find a way to justify or rectify the fact that I wanted to be someone who devoted his life to fighting for social change and I wanted to maintain my sports fandom.
Dave Zirin
The more I looked at sports, the more difficult it was to do. The more you actually look beneath the surface, beneath the adrenaline packed plays, the more you see the rampant nationalism, the insane sexism, the homophobia. If you believe in social justice, sports does not seem like the friendliest place to be. But that perspective really changed for me in 1996 when a basketball player named Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf took the position of not coming out for the national anthem before games. Today if that happened it would be a huge story for 24 hours and then we would go on to something else. But in 1996 this was a huge sports story, big profiles about it, and Rauf was eventually drummed out of the league. I’ll never forget one of the talking heads on ESPN saying that Rauf must see himself in the tradition of activist athletes like Muhammed Ali or Billie Jean King.
I was a huge sports fan and I was not aware that there was this alternative tradition in sports of people who tried to use this hyper-exulted, brought-to-you-by-Nike platform to actually say something about the world. And the more I investigated that the more I started to be fascinated by the fact that so much of this history was hidden from people like myself who were more mainstream sports fans. The second thing that fascinated me was I was seeing parallels to today. I was seeing all the things that a lot of the athletes, then, were talking about—that these struggles were ongoing. That’s really what inspired me to write about it, and it’s definitely not always easy—to put it mildly—because it’s not the friendliest of communities for these kinds of ideas. But, at the same time, the only reason I have a career is that there are a lot of Derrick Jensens out there. People who maybe like sports but hate the practice of viewership because it is so steeped in a right-wing draw and there’s an under-served audience of people who love sports but really don’t like what they’ve become and appreciate a kind of alternative analysis.
DJ: I’ve been a sports fan forever. But, it breaks my heart that they are considered so apolitical. Of course, nothing is apolitical. If something pretends to be apolitical, that supports the status quo.
Derrick Jensen
The Florida State Seminoles and the BCS bowl championship brings together so much of the sexism, the racism against indigenous peoples, and the corporate welfare that characterize so much of the big-money sports.
DZ: Sure, and don’t forget that Jameis Winston, the star quarterback, Heisman Trophy winner of Florida State, had just been cleared of accusations of rape. I’m not going to comment on his innocence or lack thereof. But the investigation itself stunk to high heaven, in terms of how much the local Tallahassee police actually were looking into it. The mentalities that Florida State fans showed towards the young woman for daring to come forward and say that she was sexually assaulted really was a head-spinner. I was getting these really creepy emails from people in Florida State who were, first of all, naming her and encouraging me to out her, which is a journalistic practice I disagree with profoundly. Secondly, they were saying “you should know the real story about her”—what I believe is called “slut-shaming”—talking about her sexual past, and who knows if any of that was true or not? They were actively courting a sports writer, and I wasn’t the only one. There’s a scary culture around sports.
DJ: You mentioned in a recent article that one of the lessons to learn from that whole incident that it’s better to be him than Trayvon Martin in Florida.
DZ: I wrote a piece about that because this country has an unbelievably horrific history of black men accused of rape, particularly in the American South. We can remember Malcolm X’s phrase, “The American South begins at the Canadian border.” But we all know that was a feature of Jim Crow—“hang first, ask questions later,” and famous cases like Emmit Till, a black kid killed for supposedly whistling at a white woman, and the Scottsboro Boys.
Of course, there are so many other times where lynchings took place against black men who were accused of rape. It says a lot about 21st century America that here’s Jameis Winston, accused of rape, and because he’s a football star, the old boy network in Tallahassee rushes to defend him. Tallahassee is not southern Florida—it’s not where my mom grew up, which was with Cubans and Jews. Tallahassee is the old south, and its defense of Winston says something about football culture in the south, and the bizarre effect it has on race and racism there.
Image Credit: Michael Nelson/Epa/REX/Shutterstock (7935715k)
Trayvon Martin was not an athletic star. He was just a kid trying to get home during halftime of the NBA all-star game and you saw the way his death was dealt with in the south and in the power structure, particularly among the police. I’m talking the difference between the sheriff where Trayvon Martin was killed, his not wanting to do anything about that, and the situation in Tallahassee where the local police force are actually telling the woman you don’t want to mess with this player on the Seminoles because that’s serious business right there.
DJ: We can also see the same dynamic in place in Steubenville.
DZ: Maryville, as well. Torrington, Connecticut. The number of cases involving sexual assault by athletes—the only reason we can reference them right now is because of social media and the work of groups like Anonymous who’ve tried to bring them to light. This is ongoing. Is something inherent in jock culture that produces rape culture? And if there is, then how do we combat it?
One of the most hopeful interviews about this subject that I did was with a woman named Katie Hnida. She was a field goal kicker, the first woman to ever score a point in a Division 1 NCAA football game. Katie Hnida’s story is rather horrific. She was going to play for the Colorado Buffaloes—big time NCAA football. She was raped by her teammates, quit the team, and went through every horror story you can imagine for a young woman who accuses someone of rape—let alone football players of rape. She played for New Mexico after that, so she didn’t give up football despite what had happened. And she had an incredibly positive experience on the New Mexico football team. I had a long interview with her where we compared and contrasted those experiences, so we could really try to get at what it is about football in particular, but jock culture in general, that produces rape culture? Can it be isolated? And, frankly, can it be destroyed?
Katie Hnida, an American football player who became the first woman to score in an NCAA Division I-A game, college football’s highest level, as as placekicker for the University of New Mexico Lobos on August 30, 2003.
DJ: What were your and her conclusions?
DZ: That jock culture left unattended becomes rape culture. You have to have people in positions of authority. Partly because of the mentality of football. It’s not grass roots, it’s very militaristic, very top-down, and it’s the people at the top that usually determine what the locker room culture is going to be. That means coaches, head coaches, athletic directors. At the pro ranks it means general managers and team presidents. They create the locker room culture, and unless you have people in authority actively intervening to make it something less toxic, then this is the fruit it will bear.
DJ: That reminds me of some of the stuff I’ve read about the relationship of military culture to rape culture.
A military is going to be at risk for being a high rape culture anyway, but there are some militaries that have had zero tolerance policies for sexual assault that have had much lower rates of rape amongst the soldiers.
DZ: A genetic cousin of rape culture is bullying culture, which we saw in the Miami Dolphins locker room this year with Richie Incognito and Jonathan Martin. Incognito bullied his teammate Martin to the point that Martin left the team. Incognito was suspended, and it imposed this discussion on the NFL of how you define “manliness.” Is Richie Incognito the real man because he’s the guy who’s going to beat up anybody who doesn’t do it his way? Or is Martin not the real man, but the real adult because he’s saying, “Wait a minute this isn’t a school yard, this is a workplace, this is a union workplace, and I’m going to stand up for my rights and actually blow the whistle on this thing?” Who do you actually respect more in that context? It’s a question a lot of NFL players had to confront.
What’s the connection between what we were just talking about with rape culture? The main one is that none of that nonsense in the Miami Dolphins locker room would have happened without the tacit, implicit, or explicit okay of the head coaches themselves. They’re the people who create the culture in the locker room. And that culture’s either productive or helpful, or not. A lot of NFL coaches talked about how they dealt with bully culture. There was a real variance. Some coaches had real philosophies about how to actively intervene in bully culture. Wouldn’t it be great if coaches could talk as openly and as publicly about how they deal or don’t deal with rape culture? They’re very similar dynamics. Groupthink, testosterone, a kind of mob mentality, not wanting to be the person who is singled out—all of these things are similar ingredients in both cultures.
When I say rape culture, when I say bully culture, it’s not that everybody who plays sports is a potential rapist or a potential bully. The question of culture is, to me, much more about turning the other way. So you see a potential rape at a party or you see a bullying situation and you don’t say anything. You’re silent in the face of that. That’s what it means by rape culture or bully culture.
Colin Kaepernick, right, and Eric Reid kneeling during the national anthem before an N.F.L. game.
DJ: And we can say, of course, the same thing about sports writers or writers in general when they attend to it or don’t attend to it.
DZ: That’s absolutely correct. That’s one of the things that’s been difficult at times. Anyone who works at a workplace, whether you’re a professor at a university, or a teacher at a public high school like my wife, or at a hotel like my cousin, wants to feel like they have colleagues. Everybody wants to feel like they have the system’s support for the work that they do. It is difficult to do, sometimes, this kind of writing and sports investigative journalism because there are people who would rather you just shut up. You’re the turd in the punch bowl. That’s sometimes difficult, but it’s not as difficult, obviously, as the people who are actually victimized by rape and bullying. I think it’s very minor compared to that. But this is about fighting cultures. It’s not some kind of level playing field where the people with the best ideas win out. It’s much more complicated than that.
DJ: I think everything you’re saying is really great. It reminds me of this study I saw where they had a bunch of people in a waiting room with two people who were in on the test. One would say something overtly racist or overtly sexist to the group. What they found was that the response of the group as a whole was not so dependent upon what the first person said as it was on the response of the other person in on the test who would say, “Oh yeah, that’s right.” Then, everyone would look on the statement more approvingly. But if the second person said, “Wow, that’s a terrible thing to say”—expressing disapproval—it gave the other people in the room courage.
I say this in terms of the mob mentality and also what you were saying about the coaches helping to create a culture. If the coach sees it and shuts it down, it’s not going to be reinforced.
DZ: I think that’s absolutely correct. I’ve played on a number of teams over the years and I’ve only had this experience once. The best case scenario would be if the players themselves determined the culture in the locker room. If you have real leadership among people, among good people who attempt to create an atmosphere of respect, you can actually create something that’s positive, there. That’s something that can exist independent of the coach. Unfortunately, though, because hierarchy is so set in sports, that’s a very difficult thing to create organically. In my situation, it only happened because we had all played together on previous teams and then a new coach came in and that new coach was sensitive and smart enough to let us dictate how things went. He would only step in when he felt things going astray. This was basketball, where teamwork and trust is very important. Those are lessons I’ve taken with me my entire life. Most importantly, it keeps me from being too cynical about sports and about sports writing because as bad as it gets, I know it could be better.
DJ: In the face of many of the insanities of this culture, it’s really important to have examples we can look to either in our own experience or in history of people who resisted and actually made a difference.
DZ: It’s so interesting that you say that, too, because the other historical pattern in America (and this is what’s so frustrating) is that when people speak out they’re absolutely vilified for it in the present. Yet decades down the line, the same people who are vilifying them are praising them. Or their children or grandchildren. It’s so much easier to look back in the past than it is in the present day.
I was doing a story recently about the upcoming Sochi Olympics where a lot of athletes may be speaking out on LGBT rights in Russia. One of the heads of the International Olympic Committee was actually praising Tommie Smith and John Carlos for their memorable moment in ’68. He was asked, “Well, what do you think about athletes doing that now?” and it was like a switch flipped. The cognitive dissonance to be able to do that, to me, is absolutely stunning—to be able to just jump so quickly, so abruptly, and so crudely. The intellectual crudeness to be able to go from “Wow, dissent is beautiful” to “Well, not dissent today” to “Politics: keep them out of the Olympics.” It’s unbelievable. And yet, that’s the rhetoric, that’s the discourse, that’s what we’re dealing with all the time.
DJ: And, of course, this is not just in sports. We can say the same thing about John Brown. We can say the same thing about the Haymarket Martyrs. We can say the same thing with the suffragists.
DZ: That’s the truth. It’s usually one of two things—either you’re buried and forgotten or your political teeth are extracted and you’re smoothed down to become something else. We deal with it every year. There are articles about the “real” Martin Luther King by people on the left who try to remind everyone that King actually believed in things that are quite radical even today. Yesterday the Department of Defense was tweeting King quotes— I don’t even think they saw ghoulishness of this—“The quality, not the longevity, of one’s life is what is important.” Is that how the Department of Defense justifies drone bombings overseas? “Yeah, we may be limiting people’s lives but, hey, that’s not really what matters.” Is there any self-consciousness that goes into that? I’m sure if Martin Luther King had been in charge of the Department of Defense, he would have turned it into the world’s most luxuriant day care center. It’s just outrageous.
In sports, though, it’s particularly difficult to get the true stories out. One reason for that is oftentimes the retired athletes themselves don’t necessarily have a vested interest in going back to their more controversial pasts. There’s no money in that. You want to be able to be on the speaker’s circuit. You want to be able to go to autograph shows.
Also, context is everything. It’s easier to be a rebel in 1968 when the fires are burning all around than in 2014, even if those fires are still there just as much as they were in 1968. They just operate in a different way.
DJ: Can we touch on the mascot issue?
DZ: Why would anyone who doesn’t live in Oklahoma even know there was such a thing as the Oklahoma Seminole Nation? When are we taught that in history class? When is the Oklahoma Seminole Nation asked for comment on anything? This is some of the invisibility of racism. Few people in our society are treated with such abject invisibility as Native Americans.
I did a talk at a college in Oregon and I was asked a question by a perfectly well-meaning liberal college student. We were talking about the Washington name change, the “R” word, and this student said to me, “Do you think the reason why there are still teams with Native American mascots is because there are no Native Americans left?”
I understood what he was trying to ask. It’s a demographic question. The reason you don’t have teams named after Latinos or African Americans is because you couldn’t. Native Americans make up 0.9% of the United States. There was a Native American young girl sitting right in front of him. She was 12 years old and she stood up in the meeting and looked at him and said, “There still are some of us left, you know.” You could have heard a pin drop.
It’s this casual racism and invisibility. White people in particular get so damn defensive where if you talk about racism in society it immediately becomes, “Oh, so what we’re all racists.” Because it’s a lot easier to do that than confronting racism itself. This is one of those classic cases. I’m not saying everyone who wears a Redskins cap or a Seminole jersey is a racist like they’re George Lincoln Rockwell 2.0. I am saying we need to do some reflecting about why there’s a team named after a racial slur, about why the Florida State Seminoles are allowed to go around with impunity and say they do this with the seal of approval from the Seminole Nation when the Florida Seminoles don’t even make up forty percent of the Seminoles nationally. That gets to some very interesting points about why the majority of Seminoles are in Oklahoma, and then you have to look seriously at this nation’s past, about the Indian Removal Act. It’s like pulling a string on a sweater. When people are watching sports or enjoying sports that’s the last thing they want to do.
DJ: I didn’t know this about their mascot. Can you mention about Osceola and make a connection to Mandela?
DZ: Absolutely. When Nelson Mandela died, quite correctly he was discussed with the most hushed possible tones—not just in the United States, but around the world. I think one of the reasons why was this person who endured 27 years behind bars emerged as the leader of his country. A remarkable thing. And he was a freedom fighter, of course, behind bars.
Osceola
Osceola was an unbelievable freedom fighter in the Seminole Wars. He fought the US Army to a standstill on multiple occasions. There was supposed to be a treaty with Osceola and when he went to the treaty, he was immediately arrested and thrown in jail. The United States was actually subject to international condemnation because of this. That’s how esteemed Osceola was. And he died in prison. I wrote in my article that Osceola was in many respects the American Mandela if Mandela had never gotten out of Robbin Island, or he is the American Steven Biko—the South African who never came out.
Yet, before Florida State games, you have someone dressed up like Osceola—usually a white person in war paint—who rides out on a horse. Osceola never actually rode a horse because he fought in the swamps. You see this constant miseducation as everyone cheers for Osceola. And, the thing about it that’s hardest to stomach is that Osceola was the replacement of Florida State’s first mascot, who was a step-and-fetch-it Native American character who went by the name of Sammy Seminole. That really was his name. In a weird way, though, Sammy Seminole is more honest for what this is, which is minstrelsy, than Osceola who is an amazing historical figure.
Can you imagine worldwide condemnation if South Africa had someone dressed up like Steven Biko or dressed up like Nelson Mandela to dance around a stadium to psyche people up before a game? You would never see that in a million years. You see that in this country, frankly, because that’s the price of colonialism, depopulation, genocide, Indian Removal. This is what you get.
DJ: Can we do a two-minute version of “sports are just fun and games?” No, actually, they’re big business, with massive corporate welfare.
DZ: There’s no getting around that. This has been a real change in the economics of sports over the last 30 years—the mass infusion of corporate welfare in sports and stadiums really operating like a neoliberal Trojan horse where cities are re-organized on neoliberal grounds.
You and I can go on a magical mystery tour through the former industrial Midwest—Cleveland, Milwaukee, Detroit. What all these places have in common is new publicly funded stadiums for basketball, baseball, and football. At the same time the erosion of union jobs, and the jobs that are created are service industry jobs. It’s not just the question of public tax money going into these stadiums, it’s the question of the return on the investment, and what jobs are actually created. Unfortunately, far too much of public stadium funding is a magical alchemy that turns tax dollars into private property.
DJ: It’d be like if I wanted to start a business and then I went to the taxpayers to the get funding to build my factory.
DZ: It’s a hell of a scam. Often, it’s a popular thing to get a new stadium, although much less so according to polls over the last fifteen years, as they have clearly and dramatically not returned on their investment, like what happened in Seattle where the beloved Supersonics basketball team was ruthlessly ripped from the city. I think you see the price much more deeply in a place like New Orleans where the levees broke and the only place suitable for shelter was the Superdome, which cost hundreds of millions of dollars, when many of the people huddled in there could not have afforded to buy a ticket to actually see a game.
DJ: I read a study back in the early ‘90s about the “multiplier effect” when a new stadium is built. Could you comment on that?
DZ: That’s a classic line about stadium funding. If you literally dumped a billion dollars from a plane, and people just picked it up and spent it, it would have a better economic multiplier effect than the building of stadiums. That in itself exposes these things for what they are.
This is the truth, Derrick, I used to go on radio shows and debate people about public stadium funding and you can’t debate it anymore, because there’s so much data that it’s a terrific waste of money. It’s like debating whether or not the sky is green. No one wants to take that position on it, either. In the context of the new normal of perpetual crisis, in which we find cities starved by gentrification and privatization, the giving of public money isn’t through referendums or public votes, but in paying off the right politicians for their stadiums.
DJ: What’s the take home message of all this? What would you like for sports fans and people who want social change to see? I’m think about the basketball player Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf, the guy you said influenced you back in the 90s, who played for the Denver Nuggets. It seems to me that his courage helped give you courage. I think that’s part of how social change takes place. One person stands up, and you stand up and hold his hand. Now the hope is that someone else will stand up and hold your hand, until we don’t have to have these discussions any more.
DZ: I think that’s great. I would also say that for a lot of these athletes the best thing we can do in the media is to be an ally. That’s like being an offensive lineman—you want to clear space so their voice can be heard. If people are saying your name too much, you might be doing something wrong.
DJ: This is Derrick Jensen for Resistance Radio on the Progressive Radio Network. Thank you so much.
Featured image: Water Protectors from the Raccoon Rebellion-Arkansas Chapter conduct a safety lock-out/tag-out of a Main Operating Valve on the Diamond Pipeline as a Christmas gift to the Natural State.
Editor’s note: This news illustrates how simple, relatively safe, and cost-effective small actions can be. They simply put locks on a pipeline valve control box. The company only needs to send an employee out with bolt cutters to undo the action, but it’s a good example of how easy it is to access such equipment, and how easy it would be to cause more lasting effects.
On Christmas, with help and assistance from Santa Claus, his reindeer, and mischievous elves, some raccoons from the Arkansas Chapter of the national “Raccoon Rebellion” conducted a safety lockout tag-out on Diamond Pipeline Main Operating Valve (MOV) #2021 east of Jerusalem, Arkansas in accordance with common industrial safety procedures. The Lockout/Tagout devices were placed to prevent access and operation of this hazardous inter-state tool of the extractive, exploitative fossil fuel industry.
Using an eminent domain provision of the State Constitution – created in the last century, the Diamond Pipeline has been drilled, dug, and blasted across the Natural State. Chairman and CEO Greg “Scrooge” Armstrong of Plains-All American (PAA) used every loophole on the books to avoid common sense review, mediation, and mitigation while misrepresenting those that opposed the threat to their water as terrorists.14 Counties, 13 major rivers and creeks, 11 drinking water watersheds, 4 Arkansas NRC Priority Watersheds, 10 Critically Endangered Species, 2 Nuclear reactors as well as major portions of the Arkansas and Mississippi River, 5 Heritage crossing sites, and countless homes, farms and property owners are affected. Any moment now the imported steel from the lowest bidder could break and the ghost of Mayflower past will coil like a black evil spirit – with no emergency plan in place.
This pipeline is unsafe. The continued construction and operation of new fossil fuel infrastructure projects like this and so many others is the TRUE CRIME. We know this from years of extensive monitoring, study, and observation supported with hard evidence–photos, federal regulation, and personal observations by experts. The flora and fauna of the Natural State admire and support the efforts of so many organizations and people that have used every available means to have an open and meaningful dialogue and review. However, we can wait no longer.
Future interventions in the interest of common public safety must occur. In solidarity with the “Rabbit Ridge Resistance” we echo the demands they made before the line went into limited operation.
We demand that Governor Asa Hutchinson:
– Invoke executive authority to halt operation of the Diamond Pipeline for the protection of the people, lands, and wildlife of Arkansas.
– Conduct a complete review of all the information concerning pipeline safety and construction irregularities and hold public meeting in every county affected.
– Conduct complete review of use of law enforcement and security groups in the suppression of lawful 1st Amendment activities associated with protest and opposition to oil and gas industries.
– Invoke a complete moratorium on any OTHER use of eminent domain laws by private utility companies until effective procedures are in place to assess and provide public input to ANY use of those laws.
– Create a bonded, insurance fund to cover ANY potential damage caused by the leak, explosion, or faulty construction by any oil and gas infrastructure project.
–Raccoon Rebellion – Arkansas Chapter
WASHINGTON— Conservation groups filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration today for failing to respond to their emergency request to ban certain seafood imports from Mexico’s Gulf of California in order to save the critically endangered vaquita porpoise from extinction.
Fewer than 30 vaquita now remain on the planet after the population suffered a 95 percent decline over the past 20 years. Entanglement in fishing gillnets is the sole threat to the species’ survival. Scientists predict that the vaquita will be extinct by 2019 if fishing practices remain unchanged.
In May the groups filed a formal legal petition requesting that the U.S. government ban the import of seafood from Mexico that was caught in the vaquita’s habitat using deadly gillnets. Today’s lawsuit seeks an immediate response to that emergency petition. A U.S. ban on lucrative Mexican seafood imports will pressure Mexico to fully ban gillnets and strengthen much-needed enforcement.
“We’ve asked politely that the U.S. government take action to save the vaquita by banning Mexican seafood imports,” said Sarah Uhlemann, international program director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “But the clock is running out for the vaquita and it’s time to demand action. The Trump administration must use the strongest possible pressure quickly to force Mexico’s hand in protecting the vaquita before it’s too late.”
Mexico has failed to permanently ban all gillnets in the vaquita’s habitat, despite repeated recommendations by scientists and evidence that the use of gillnets by any fishery — in or adjacent to the vaquita’s range — will undeniably lead to the species’ extinction.
“We can’t leave any tool unused that will help get the vaquita’s killer — gillnets — out of their habitat,” said Zak Smith, senior attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council’s Marine Mammal Protection Project. “The fishing industry is driving the vaquita’s extinction — and pressure on that group to fix their practices may be the most important way to save these porpoises. The United States must immediately ban the import of any seafood from Mexico that is contributing to the vaquita’s extinction.”
The U.S. Marine Mammal Protection Act requires the U.S. government to ban seafood imports from fisheries that kill marine mammals, including the vaquita, in excess of U.S. standards for marine mammal bycatch (the accidental entanglement and deaths of marine mammals in fishing gear). If American standards were applied to Mexican fishermen operating in and near the vaquita’s habitat, fishermen would be prohibited from contributing to the bycatch of any vaquita because it is gravely endangered and losing its population at a rate of nearly 40 percent each year.
“Mexico has known for decades what must be done to save the vaquita, yet has not found the political will to stop the species from plummeting toward extinction,” said Kate O’Connell, marine wildlife consultant with the Animal Welfare Institute. “If the U.S. government does not step up and use its laws to compel the Mexican government to save the species by banning certain seafood imports, it too will be complicit in the loss of the vaquita.”
In 2016, following a legal petition by conservation groups, the Service adopted new rules to enforce the Marine Mammal Protection Act’s import provision. Those rules will be fully applicable worldwide by 2022. Today’s lawsuit seeks emergency application of the rules to save the vaquita.
HAWAII: For the first time, ecosystems and natural communities on eight acres of land on the island of Kaua’i possess legal rights to exist, thrive, regenerate, and evolve. This is the first Rights of Nature conservation easement on the Hawaiian Islands.
The effects of pollution and climate change wrought by corporate practices are devastating habitats and destabilizing communities on Hawaii and other Pacific islands. For many residents, waiting for government to protect them is no longer an option.
“Rights of Nature is already in the air, the sea, and the people of Hawaii, so recognizing legal Rights of Nature on land that is in my name came quite easily for me,” explained Joan Porter, the Kaua’i landowner who recognized nature’s rights through the conservation easement. “I established the easement in hopes that other landowners and governments will also understand the need to change the status of nature from property to bearing rights.”
CELDF assisted Porter in the drafting of the easement, making Kaua’i the second locality where a private landowner in the U.S. changed the status of nature through an easement to recognize the rights of ecosystems and natural communities in perpetuity. The Kaua’i easement contains provisions on climate change, genetic engineering, restriction of corporate rights, and enforcement language.
A key partner in the Rights of Nature work in Hawaii has been the Kaua’i-based organization Coherence Lab. Prajna Horn, co-founder and executive director, stated, “There is a fundamental shift happening across our planet today, where more people are beginning to understand Indigenous wisdom and the inseparable relationship between humans and the Earth. Rights of Nature is rooted in Indigenous wisdom and is based on aligning with Natural Law. Thus, the legalization of the Rights of Nature is really about a remembering of how to live a harmonious, balanced and respectful life for the sake future generations. I’ve been engaged in the Rights of Nature movement for close to a decade. Through this conservation easement and other Rights of Nature work, I am grateful to have had the chance to bring CELDF to Kaua’i.”
For over a decade, CELDF has been assisting communities, countries, and tribal nations to transform the legal status of nature. In 2006, Tamaqua Borough, Pennsylvania, became the first government in the world to legally recognize nature’s rights. Since then, more than three dozen communities in more than 10 states in the U.S. have secured nature’s rights. In 2008, CELDF assisted Ecuador to draft constitutional provisions recognizing the Rights of Nature. The new constitution was overwhelmingly adopted by citizens. Most recently, the General Council of the Ho-Chunk Nation in Wisconsin approved an amendment to their tribal constitution to recognize the Rights of Nature.
As the Rights of Nature builds momentum, in the past year, courts in India and Colombia have issued decisions recognizing the rights of rivers and glaciers. In its decision securing rights of the Atrato River, the Colombia Constitutional Court wrote:
“…[H]uman populations are those that are interdependent on the natural world – not the other way around – and…they must assume the consequences of their actions and omissions in relation to nature. It’s about understanding this new socio-political reality with the aim of achieving a respectful transformation with the natural world and its environment, just as has happened before with civil and political rights…economic, social and cultural rights…and environmental rights.”
“The Rights of Nature easement is a bold first step in a broader legal and cultural paradigm shift,” says Kai Huschke, Northwest and Hawaii organizer for CELDF. “For generations, the people and ecosystems of Hawaii have endured ‘legalized’ colonization, toxic pollutants, and GMOs. People are saying ‘Enough!’ Many residents in Hawaii – and around the world – are moving towards law being used to protect the rights of coral reefs or the rights of tropical forests, rather than law being used to destroy them.”
The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund is a non-profit, public interest law firm providing free and affordable legal services to communities facing threats to their local environment, local agriculture, local economy, and quality of life. Its mission is to build sustainable communities by assisting people to assert their right to local self-government and the Rights of Nature. www.celdf.org.
