Todd Zimmer of RAN introduced the panel by noting that the audience included community members from Charlotte as well as student leaders of the campus fossil fuel divestment movement from Western Washington, Brown, Harvard, and Davidson. Todd remarked that although Bank of America has stated its intention to be a leader on climate and clean energy, its track record as the number one funder of the coal industry is in direct conflict with this ambition. The bank’s lending and financing decisions involving the coal industry that are made at the bank’s headquarters in Uptown Charlotte impose immense costs for communities in the U.S. and around the world.

The first guest speaker, Ashish Fernandes of Greenpeace spoke about the dangers of India’s coal industry to rural communities, the environment, and to investors exposed to risky energy infrastructure in the country. Contrary to the myth that a coal boom in India is inevitable due to the country’s energy needs, most new coal plants and mines face huge community opposition across India. In the last three years alone, courts have sent back at least four different power plants to drawing board. India produces 65 percent of its electricity from coal, and produces 90% of its coal from open pit mines, which endanger over a million hectares of forest, and threaten the livelihoods of forest-dependent communities in the country’s coal belt. Fortunately, wind is now cheaper than new coal plants in India and solar will reach grid parity with coal in under four years. However, the enduring influence of India’s coal lobby risks locking the country into coal dependence.

Next, Barbara Gottlieb, the director of health and advocacy for Physicians for Social Responsibility spoke to the global impacts of climate change on health. She began by highlighting that climate change is no longer a theoretical problem: It is happening now, and it is happening to us. Furthermore, she emphasized that climate change is not just an environmental issue. The British medical journal The Lancet called climate change “the health challenge of the 21^st Century.” Barbara noted that climate change is associated with more frequent and more intense storms, extreme heat waves, and drought, all of which pose acute risks to human health. She concluded by stressing that there is a way forward for Bank of America and the financial sector: Shifting their financing to clean, renewable energy.

Next, Bonnie McKinley from Portland, Oregon spoke to her experiences working with Power Past Coal and Rising Tide North America to fight plans to export coal from Wyoming and Montana’s Powder River Basin through ports on the Pacific Northwest. Currently, Arch Coal, Peabody Energy, Kinder Morgan, and other companies have introduced plans to build export infrastructure to ship Powder River Basin coal to be burned in India, China, and elsewhere in Asia. These proposed coal export terminals would bring up to 70 coal trains per day (each up to a mile-and-a-half long) through residential neighborhoods, leaving a trail of heavy metal-laden coal dust and putting communities at risk for derailments. Bonnie concluded on a hopeful note, remarking that a proposed railway for coal exports would never be built because, in the words of activist Vanessa Braided Hair, “Arch Coal understands money. What Arch Coal doesn’t understand is community. They don’t understand history. They don’t understand the Cheyenne people whose ancestors fought and died for the land that they are proposing to destroy. They don’t understand the fierceness with which the people, both Indian and non-Indian, in southeastern Montana love the land.” Bonnie also had a message for her baby boomer peers, urging them to take action to protect their communities and the climate: “Please get out and work for our special planet.”

Finally, Kathy Selvage from Wise County, West Virgina spoke about her decade-long experience fighting the impacts of mountaintop removal mining in her community and throughout Appalachia. She began by calling for the bank to “return to the integrity I knew decades ago” as an employee of a predecessor bank, Wise County National. Kathy spoke of her mother, who “would go outside and read the bible on front porch, then raise eyes to ponder what she had just read. When she raised her eyes, she saw a beautiful mountain across from her.” But after Glen Morgan Properties destroyed the mountain as part of one of their mountaintop removal mines, when her mother raised her eyes, “she saw the devastation of god’s creation.” The devastation wrought by the coal company that destroyed her community inspired Kathy to become active in the fight against mountaintop removal.

Kathy concluded by urging the audience to think about the interconnections between climate change, mountaintop removal, and other environmental issues. Faced with growing evidence of environmental threats hurting our communities and the environment, she reminded us that “we can no longer afford to stand still like we’re not a part of this planet.”

Rev. Billy and The Church of Stop Shopping are in the Bay Area this week! Click here for tour dates.

Mike Roselle’s smack-down of “Big Green” and Sandra Steingraber’s letter from jail–serving time for her fracking resistance in upstate New York–show us the sea-change that must take place in green activist culture.

I met Randy Hayes, RAN founder, in the late 80′s and came to know the Earth First and Redwood Summer activism while a Bay Area resident. Now these years later, we’ve worked with RAN campaigners Amanda Starbuck, Scott Parkin, and Annie Sartor in Mountaintop Removal activism.  During our partnership with RAN we began blasphemous performers in lobbies of big banks:  JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, PNC, UBS, Deutsche Bank and HSBC–are among the banks whose gods we have transgressed against–with BankTrack’s latest study as our Bible, supplied by RAN.

I moved from the Bay Area to New York in the early 90′s and gathered the singing activists after Reverend Billy’s sidewalk preaching began in front of the Disney Store in Times Square. Our activist group, legally constructed like a small theater company, was soon defending community gardens in the city. We took turns responding to hesitant overtures by such Big Green orgs as NRDC and Sierra Club, but we proved too wild and woolly. Meanwhile, since 2005′s Katrina and Rita storms–our “Devil” turned from big retail toward the CO2 emitting (think Dirty Coal) investments by big banks.

Most of our partners are local veterans of the MTR, fracking or pipeline wars. Time and time again, after a collaboration with a big green org, after a concert or a videotape or leading a parade before a rally–our relationship would end. A harsh example:  in 2007, when the Stop Shopping activists were hotly pursuing Starbucks for their suppression of licensing opportunities for the makers of Ethiopia’s Sidamo and Harrar coffees–we were told by Oxfam America that “We cannot state publically that we are working with you.” By that time we had gone to jail several times, and were involved in a YouTube duel with a Starbucks’ marketing VP.  Although the campaign was a success for Ethiopian coffee families, Oxfam didn’t want to be identified with activists who were sitting in the Tombs. They had that disease called “Fear of the what the imaginary middle class might think.”

Oxfam may have objected to our manipulation of fundamentalist religious memes, of the use of humor, dance and music in our activism, or just our lack of money. Who knows?  In 2013 –would Oxfam personnel feel differently about us, as eco-activism increasingly resembles the dramas (and arrests and police violence) of the Civil Rights Movement? We believe that the orgs of Big Green, and the foundations and donors that often side with them–are ready for a change. Everyone everywhere that loves Earth is becoming radicalized. There is more of a connection now with cultural change in American history, which has always involved bodily risk, music and general brazenness. Amen?

Rainforest Action Network staff–thank you for your hosting of our REVOLT OF THE GOLDEN TOAD Bay Area Tour. Our connection to your founders, and to your ambitious activism against the climate-change financing by big banks–feels like a natural home.

Earthalujah!

Beach below Para Falls, Caura River. Photo by Kike Arnal

Through our Protect-an-Acre program, RAN recently provided a small grant to Caura Futures. This lean, innovative organization supports the conservation of the 45,300 km² Caura River Basin in Venezuela, one of the few pristine tropical watersheds on Earth, by working with local Indigenous communities and providing training and tools to improve human health and promote good ecosystem stewardship.

Caura Futures understands that it is industrial society, not Indigenous peoples, that threatens tropical rainforests. However, through consultation with elders from Indigenous communities throughout the Caura River Basin, the problem of accelerated erosion of Indigenous culture caused, in part, by sharply diminished knowledge transfer between generations, was identified as an important issue to address. Collectively, they found that by collaborating on projects to fortify people’s health, strengthen cultural traditions, and create low impact ways of improving economic well-being, the long-term potential for conservation of the Caura River ecosystem would be greatly enhanced.

Emilio Rodríguez documenting Ye'kwana bird names with an older member of the community. Photo by Tarek Milleron.

So how does this look on the ground? Caura Futures is helping to improve malaria prevention, detection and treatment by training Indigenous microscopists (light microscopy is still the gold-standard of malaria detection) who also treat the disease, and by distributing mosquito nets designed for use around hammocks. They are also helping to establish the Ye’kwana Cultural Library: an extensive effort to build a bridge to the past by facilitating still image, audio and video recording of all cultural knowledge that Ye’kwana participants decide they want to conserve.

The competitive spirit comes into play because in some communities Ye’kwana youths today are more likely to fell, rather than climb, a palm tree for its fruit. Unlike industrial palm oil plantations that cause widespread deforestation, extracting oil for local markets from naturally occurring wild palm fruit is a sustainable practice when traditional harvesting methods are followed. To address the tree-felling issue, Caura Futures has created new enthusiasm for wild palm tree-climbing by turning it into a competition. Caura Futures provides tree climbing gear and holds competitions to promote a return to sustainable fruit harvests.

Practice on Oenocarpus palms with Caura Futures' custom gear. Photo by Kike Arnal.

Local Ye’kwana and Sanema people make all decisions regarding activities to be realized in their communities. They curate and control all Indigenous knowledge archives, and they review and approve all introduced technologies. Tree climbing competitions and workshops have been held four times in the Caura Basin. By starting small, gear design has been optimized. The initial races were won by older people, but after being engaged, youth are now winning the competition and changing their harvest methods. Here’s what happened last time.

Our grant will help the palm climbing project expand to Iquitos, Peru, where wild palm fruit markets are highly developed and the problem of felling palms is widespread. Please consider supporting Caura Futures’ work directly, or supporting RAN’s Protect-an-Acre program to help us fund great work protecting forests around the world.

…a local man named Donald Moncayo showed me around. Wearing white surgical gloves, he dug up a fistful of black mud and held it so that the sunlight caught the telltale blue-orange tint of petroleum. At one fetid pit in a jungle glade, he stepped gingerly onto the surface of the pool, where the solid matter in the produced water had congealed into a tar like crust that was sturdy enough to support him. Smiling a little, Moncayo shifted his weight from one foot to the other, until the whole surface began to undulate beneath him. He looked like a kid on a waterbed… Watching Moncayo, I had a sense of deja vu. He is the regular master of ceremonies on the toxic tour…But if Moncayo’s cadences were rote; there was nothing feigned about his indignation. – Patrick Radden Keefe, writing in The New Yorker, 1/9/12

Donald Moncayo has acted as the “fixer” for hundreds of journalists over the last decade on what has become known as “the toxic tour.” He has been described in hundreds of articles (along with the toxic waste pits that he shows visiting journalists), and he could possibly be the most photographed man in the northeastern Ecuadorean Amazon.

Many days Donald Moncayo (left) acts as the "fixer" for journalists, giving them what has become known as "the Toxic Tour” of contamination in the region.

Some journalists choose to (or are capable of) seeing more than others. Some ask him questions about his own life, and they learn that he lost his mother to oil contamination. Or they ask him about his childhood and they learn that he had two options on his walk to elementary school: barefoot on the searing and rusting oil pipeline or barefoot on the dirt road sprayed with oil to keep the dust down. Others, like Keefe from the New Yorker, use Donald as “color” for their story — and somehow manage to add insulting commentary, like: “He looked like a kid on a waterbed,” or “he is the regular master of ceremonies on the toxic tour.”

That there is such a “tour” (that there needs to be such a tour!) of the greatest tropical rainforest on Earth is just another wretched and bizarre aspect of the tragedy that has befallen this land as a result of Texaco (now Chevron’s) oil operations here.

The “toxic tour”, as it has been named, is not a choice of the communities. It is a necessity — an uncomfortable, at times humiliating, necessity. It is an invitation to the world — to outsiders — to witness the suffering of the people that live here, to witness the real casualties of oil-dependent societies. And in doing so there is a hope, a vulnerable human promise between the people living here and the visitors, that something good and honest will result from the exchange between worlds. A powerful photograph that is shared with hundreds or maybe even thousands of people, promoting greating understanding in distant worlds; or a courageous journalist unafraid to expose the arrogant and unforgivable actions of a multinational titan like Chevron; or maybe even just a portrait of what life is like here — a kind of ode to humility and dignity.

In the coming days I will write a piece (at least will attempt to) on morality, blindness and cowardice in journalism. For now, I’d just like to share some photographs that I took last Sunday working with Donald and his wife and daughter in his cacao field (cocoa field), which is edged by a small contaminated stream from the days of Texaco.

Donald and his daughter Leonela Yasuni Moncayo in their home, perched on a bluff in the outskirts of Lago Agrio along the Via Colombia (20 kilometers from the Colombian border). Donald named his daughter after the Yasuni rainforest, one of the most bio-diverse places on the planet, also under threat from oil extraction.

Donald's wife Lorena prepares breakfast (fried yucca with cheese and canned tuna) before a long day in the cacao field, a stretch of the same contaminated fields he would “toxic tour” just days before.

The bedroom. Donald is saving money now (through harvesting his cacao) to buy metal window grates for his bedroom. In the last month there have been several failed robbery attempts at his house. It is unclear if the robbery attempts are politically motivated, part of oil company intimidation, or just part of the violence and crime that plagues the oil boom town Lago Agrio.

Arriving in Donald's cacao field. The entire day was filled with hard work, blistering sun, and moments, like this, of laughter. Leonela Yasuni was an angel the whole day. She is an observant and imaginative little girl, and spent a lot of time kneeling over watching the affairs of insects.

Splitting open the cacao pod. Inside are the seeds, covered in a white mucus-like pulp. Both seed and pulp are placed in a bucket. My job was to separate the cacao seeds (and help Donald harvest the pods -- but I was always picking the unripe pods. Lot's to learn).

Donald throwing the cacao pods to his wife, Lorena.

This is Donald's dog "Cual?" (which means, Which?). His other dog is named "Quien?" (which means Who?). Donald is scaling a cacao tree. This was his job the entire day, harvesting ripe cacao pods and trimming the overgrown limbs of the cacao tree.

These are the cacao seeds which will eventually be used to make chocolate. The pulp and seed will be laid under the sun for several days and will undergo "sweating", where the pulp evaporates leaving behind only the cacao seed. It is interesting to note that when Columbus "discovered" the Americas he brought back cacao seeds to show the Catholic Monarchs, who found them bitter and repulsive. Chocolate would not be enjoyed by Europeans until hundreds of years later.

The cacao fields share the same stretch of forest where Donald spends many of his days giving Toxic Tours.

Returning home. We leave the cacao field and pass over a stream contaminated with oil. We are at the source of both oil and chocolate.

Activists and concerned citizens from around the world are standing with Bradley Manning. So are Naomi Klein and Daniel Ellsberg, the whistleblower who leaked the Pentagon Papers. Click to enlarge image.

if you had free reign over classified networks for long periods of time… … and you saw incredible things, awful things… things that belonged in the public domain, and not on some server stored in a dark room in Washington DC… what would you do?  … say… a database of half a million events during the iraq war… from 2004 to 2009… with reports, date time groups, lat-lon locations, casualty figures… ? or 260,000 state department cables from embassies and consulates all over the world, explaining how the first world exploits the third, in detail, from an internal perspective?

This quote is attributed to PFC Bradley Manning, a 23 year-old intelligence analyst for the U.S. military who was stationed in eastern Baghdad until his arrest last May. It comes from an internet chat log turned over to the FBI by hacker Adrian Lamo, famous originally for his internet activism against large corporations. In these chat logs Bradley allegedly discussed his role in leaking hundreds of thousands of classified documents to WikiLeaks.

PFC Manning’s case has already drawn the attention of most major news sources, with mixed coverage. On the positive side, he was just nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, and was the UK Guardian reader’s choice for the award. Undoubtedly, more Americans will hear of him as the year progresses.

But what should the public think of this undeniably complicated case? And why does discussion of PFC Manning belong here on an environmental blog? I will attempt to answer both of these questions shortly, but first allow me to introduce myself.

I currently work as an organizer for Courage to Resist, a non-profit that supports GI War Resisters facing various sorts of legal and political challenges. However, I organized for environmental justice throughout college and I even spent four months interning at RAN.

Courage to Resist is the fiscal sponsor for the Bradley Manning Support Network, an international movement involving a broad range of organizations and activists. We have taken up the cause of PFC Manning because he is the most prominent GI Resister of our time, and we believe the handling of his case will set a precedent for other government and military whistleblowers. Not only that, but the outcome of PFC Manning’s trial will have a significant influence on the future of our democracy, and the work of those advocating for social change in particular, RAN being no exception.

What we know about PFC Bradley Manning prior to his arrest is that he was a young idealistic man from a working class background. According to a gay rights activist with whom Manning had conversations, Bradley followed his father’s footsteps in joining the army because he had dreams of attending college to study Physics, but did not have the financial resources. Smart, technologically adept, openly queer (a friend once said Bradley credited his participation in anti-DADT marches for sparking his interest in other political issues), he also took the perspective of a world citizen. Although he wished the Army was more friendly to diversity, he hoped that through his service he could spread democracy, and save both U.S. and Iraqi lives.

Because of his technological skills, he was given the job of Intelligence Analyst stationed in Eastern Baghdad. At the beginning of his deployment, he told friends and family that he was happy and proud of his position. It was some time during his deployment that his views began to change. Insight as to why comes from the chat logs attributed to him:

i think the thing that got me the most… that made me rethink the world more than anything… was watching 15 detainees taken by the Iraqi Federal Police… for printing “anti-Iraqi literature”… the iraqi federal police wouldn’t cooperate with US forces, so i was instructed to investigate the matter, find out who the “bad guys” were, and how significant this was for the FPs… it turned out, they had printed a scholarly critique against PM Maliki… i had an interpreter read it for me… and when i found out that it was a benign political critique titled “Where did the money go?” and following the corruption trail within the PM’s cabinet… i immediately took that information and *ran* to the officer to explain what was going on… he didn’t want to hear any of it… he told me to shut up and explain how we could assist the FPs in finding *MORE* detainees… everything started slipping after that… i saw things differently… i had always questioned the things worked, and investigated to find the truth… but that was a point where i was a *part* of something… i was actively involved in something that i was completely against…

Several months after that incident took place, Bradley Manning was charged with releasing the documents now known as the Collateral Murder video, Iraq War Logs, Afghan War Diary, and U.S. Diplomatic Cables (which included one document which is being credited with the Obama Administration agreeing to withdraw all troops from Iraq).

The revealed information describes thousands of secret actions of top U.S. State Department and military officials, as well as officials from other governments around the world. Actions that fit into a historical pattern of how wealth and big business influence U.S. relations abroad, but that run contrary to the public image most politicians strive to present. The information he is accused of releasing has been cited in over a third of New York Times editions of the past year. The revealed documents give us tremendous insight into what it truly means to call the United States a world power.

Many environmental organizations, RAN being a prime example, recognize that the immense power of modern multinational corporations is a major threat in the struggle for a just and sustainable world. Beholden to their shareholders and their bottom-line above all else, these corporations stoop to promoting lies about how ethical their operating processes are, debunked by groups such as RAN. They also use their immense financial resources, with larger spending power than many small countries, to influence public policy through backroom lobbying.

Here are some examples of the sorts of environmental crimes revealed through the documents Bradley Manning allegedly gave to WikiLeaks, crimes which have been blogged about by Greenpeace, RAN, and other similar organizations:

• The 2010 BP oil disaster could have been predicted and prevented. It turns out BP had a massive oil blowout in Azerbaijan in 2008 that was very similar in cause and consequence to their blowout in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010.
• The Fukushima nuclear disaster could also have been avoided. The disaster is now ranked more severe than Chernobyl, due to contamination. Japan was warned two years ago that their nuclear power plants could not withstand a major earthquake.
• The U.S. used spying, threats, and promises of aid to gain support for the Copenhagen Accord. The Copenhagen Climate Accord of 2009 has been criticized by environmental groups across the board, because it is not legally binding and does not commit countries to agree to a binding successor to the Kyoto Protocol. Additionally, although the United States has the highest per capita carbon emissions in the world, the Accord allows us the lowest target for emissions reductions of any industrialized nation, at 17%.
• Peru’s government has secretly admitted that 70-90% of its mahogany exports were illegally felled. Home Depot, Lowe’s and Lumber Liquidators have all confirmed they use the timber in their products. The loggers pose a grave threat to uncontacted Murunahua Indians who could be wiped out by diseases brought by outsiders or face inter-tribal warfare if they are pushed off their lands.
• An Indonesian governor believes that the Indonesian Military keeps more troops in Papua New Guinea than it admits to in order to facilitate illegal logging operations. Additionally, a senior official for Freeport mine, Indonesia’s largest taxpayer, admitted that average Papuans see few benefits from the extractive industries’ revenues.
• Several countries, including the United States, are preparing to fight over Arctic oil. While President Obama publicly declared a commitment to protecting the Arctic’s unique ecosystem and Indigenous culture, State Department correspondence reveals an alarmingly different story.
• A U.S. diplomat warned the Obama administration about significant environmental impacts stemming from Canada’s controversial tar sands oil production program. This contradicts public statements from the State Department that attempt to downplay the environmental impact of the tar sands.
• The U.S. government conspired with Biotech companies to force genetically modified organisms (GMOs) on the European Union.
• In correspondence with U.S. officials, the oil giant Shell claimed that it had inserted staff into all main ministries of the Nigerian government, allowing it secret insight and political influence in the oil-rich Niger Delta.
• Chevron executives worked in tandem with U.S. officials to avoid paying $18.2 billion in court-ordered damages after the energy giant acquired Texaco, which had dumped billions of gallons of waste in Indigenous areas.

Looking at this evidence, I conclude that we cannot create a sustainable world for ourselves and fellow living beings without government and corporate transparency and accountability. And we cannot have transparency and accountability of powerful systems without whistleblowers like PFC Bradley Manning.

When Adrian Lamo asked PFC Manning what he hoped to accomplish as a result of the leaks, he allegedly said “hopefully worldwide discussion, debate, and reforms… I want people to see the truth… regardless of who they are… because without information, you cannot make informed decisions as a public.” It will be nothing short of a tragedy for our democracy if a young, conscientious whistleblower who has exposed so much of the dirty underbelly of foreign diplomacy between powerful economic interests goes to prison for life to prevent the American conscience from being challenged with the truth. The truth that a world led by neoliberal policies and corporations cannot create a more just future. The truth that it’s up to us, as American citizens, to hold our leaders accountable and organize ourselves persistently until we create the world we want to see.

On Monday last week the Military finally announced that after 18 months of incarceration, Bradley’s first day in court will be held on December 16 in the Washington D.C. area. The Bradley Manning Support Network is organizing a demonstration on December 17, which is also Bradley’s birthday, and there will be solidarity actions taking place around the world. Please visit our website for more information.

More resources:

Bradley Manning now faces a military trial and the possibility of life in prison.  Find our petition to free him and other ways you can help here.

Filmmaker Michael Moore recently explained at the #OccupySF general assembly how Bradley Manning helped inspire #OccupyWallStreet. Watch the video.

This post was written by Emma Cape, former RAN intern and current organizer for Courage to Resist.

Katie Burgess, Executive Director of Minneapolis-based Trans Youth Support Network, calls out Cargill's absuvie labor and environmental history. Photo Credit: Taylor Foster

Katie Burgess, executive director of the Trans Youth Support Network, was asked to address the 18th Annual Coming Out Day Luncheon last week. But when she learned that Cargill was a corporate sponsor of the event, she decided to address an issue that was far more important than keeping everyone comfortable.

Instead of kissing up to the corporate sponsor, Katie eloquently revealed to an astonished but well-heeled audience of 300 the ugly truth about Cargill: No charitable sponsorship will ever be able to hide the devastation that it has caused to forests and communities around the world as Cargill abuses people and planet in a rush for unethical profit.

Read Katie’s strong, eloquent speech exposing Cargill’s despicable record on everything from palm oil to child labor to weakened food safety standards.

I had a chance to speak with Katie last week in a coffee shop on Lake Street in Minneapolis and was so inspired by her wise, compassionate description of movement intersectionality: where LGBTQ communities and organizations struggling for rights, recognition, and support meet the stark realities of international solidarity. Katie recognizes that even an event promoting LGBTQ equality in the workplace can be dwarfed if the corporate sponsor’s work is actively oppressing and endangering LGBTQ and other communities. There are literally billions of people around the world that are suffering under the free trade and corporatized agricultural systems advocated for and ruled by Cargill, and it is this larger, deeper, and serious concern to which Katie drew the attention of the luncheon attendees at the Minneapolis Hilton last week.

We support Katie’s bold choice to go against the grain in solidarity with people around the world who suffer and even die because of Cargill’s profit motive. Her words to Cargill say it all:

You have left a sea of bodies in your hurried wake. Bodies who are continuously policed by this system for existing outside of gender norms, for not being white, for being disabled, for being born in foreign countries, or for desiring and expressing their own femininity.

Let me share with you some examples:

In 2005, the International Labor Rights Fund filed suit against Cargill, Nestlé and Archer Daniels Midland in federal court on behalf of children who were trafficked from Mali into the Ivory Coast and forced to work 12 to 14 hours a day with no pay, little food and sleep, and frequent physical abuse on cocoa bean plantations.

Cargill is the leading importer of palm oil into the United States. Palm oil expansion is a leading cause of forest loss in Indonesia and has a devastating impact on biodiversity, forest-dependent peoples, and the climate.

In 1970, Cargill sold 63,000 tons of seed grain to Basra, Iraq treated with methylmercury, a practice banned in most Western countries. Though intended for agricultural use, and not for human or animal consumption, some recipients used it as food, as the only printed warnings about the poison were written in English and Spanish, intended as warnings for American dock workers. This led to the deaths of 93 people.

How many of them were LGBTQ? Were their deaths and mistreatment factored into Cargill’s 100% rating in HRC’s 2010 Corporate Equality Index? Our struggles are bound together. When they came for your children in Mali, I did not speak up because I am from the United States. When they came for my workplace equality, there was no one left to speak up. Our community spans more than these strung together letters of LGBTQ. Our liberation is bound with all whom struggle against these machine works of oppression.

Members and allies of the Trans Youth Support Network at a rally to end violence against Trans Women of Color in Minneapolis, July 2010.

Following Katie’s speech, Cargill employees came up to her to ask for sources, saying they had never heard about these issues and want to talk about it at work. Go employees, talk! Complain! Demand change. Cargill executives can’t hide the truth from us all.

More and more people are seeing and hearing the truth. More and more people are rejecting the status quo. It’s up to all of us. It is my hope that Katie’s choice to address Cargill’s pinkwashing will create a much-needed dialogue in the GLTB organizational community (and within any advocacy or issue-based community) about who we choose to partner with to advocate for a better world. Organizations must be scrupulous in making sure sponsors walk their ethical talk.

Katie Burgess, thank you for boldly speaking truth to power.

RAN's Toyo Kawakami Organizes a Rare Public Protest in Japan Against Rainforest Destruction

This October marks the sixth anniversary of the opening of Rainforest Action Network’s Japan office, spearheaded by our Tokyo-based, activist-ambassador Toyo Kawakami.

Toyo began working for RAN in 2005, campaigning to convince large Japanese paper companies and retailers to stop buying wood chips linked to the destruction of Tasmania’s old growth forests sold by Australian timber giant Gunns Limited.  Gunns was the target of widespread opposition in Tasmania due to its clear-cutting of priceless and irreplaceable ancient eucalyptus groves.

Toyo’s efforts to educate large corporate buyers and Japanese banks, arrange Japanese delegation visits to Tasmania, secure contract cancellations, and wrangle media attention added significant pressure to a global campaign that achieved a major victory in 2010 when Gunns Ltd agreed to pull out of native forest logging altogether.

Toyo has now turned his sights to Indonesia, as RAN takes on an even larger and more intractable forest destroyer: Asia Pulp and Paper (APP). Japan is one of the world’s leading markets for paper products, where the use of fiber from Indonesia’s endangered rainforests is rapidly expanding.

Askul, the largest Japanese buyer of APP products, is estimated to purchase over 100,000 tons of paper from APP each year, a contract worth over US$100 million annually. Askul’s president has a reputation for caring about climate change, and the company already has a decent paper policy, but the relationship with APP makes it clear that the company’s paper policy is not being carefully applied. APP papers have possibly the highest carbon footprint in the world due to APP’s use of wood fiber from rainforest destruction and because the company’s pulp plantations are often planted on highly carbon-emissive peat soils.

Toyo Meets With Executives in Japan

In part, Askul is relying on the Indonesian Ecolabel Institute (LEI) to certify that the paper it buys is environmentally and socially responsible. But LEI fails to ensure that all of the areas it certifies are maintaining high conservation values, respecting community rights, and are free of social conflict. Furthermore, the fact that both APP and Indonesia’s other leading logging giant and rainforest destroyer, APRIL, sits on its board of directors raises serious questions about whether LEI is independent.

Toyo is working with Askul to begin implementation of its existing policy. This involves encouraging the company to push APP to stop further conversion of natural forests into plantations and to resolve social conflicts created by the company — or risk losing Askul’s very lucrative business.

Japanese culture around environmentalism, business relationships, and conflict is very different than here in the United States, and as a result Toyo is constantly challenged to adapt RAN’s style of market campaigning in ways that can lead to effective outcomes in Japan.

Toyo’s hurdles may be huge, but his track record of talented tenacity and patient perseverance points toward success. RAN is proud to be represented by Toyo as the rainforest’s man in Japan, and we look forward to keeping RAN supporters updated as his work progresses.

The journey began from the city of Jambi with a harrowing 12-hour drive through treacherously muddy and mangled roads. The trip was alternately exhilarating and terrifying. Our little Daihatsu 4×4 slid backwards off the steep, slick slopes into ditches more than once. A crude wooden bridge shattered under us as we passed over it. We regularly had to get out into the mud to push. At many points it seemed entirely feasible we wouldn’t make it at all.

RAN forest campaigner Lafcadio Cortesi keeping good spirits during one of the many times we had to get out and push the car through the mud

But such is the price of paradise found. The remote, highland village of Tanjung Alam (literally, “Corner of Nature”) is a traditional Malayu Adat community of just under 100 families surrounded by the largest block of primary rainforest remaining in Sumatra. The Adat system is a traditional Indonesian-Malay form of cultural organization that guides the social structure, decision-making and dispute resolution practices of its people. In this area, the Muslim faith has long since been integrated into this ancient form of localized government.

Our host Rudi (who works with a RAN-allied NGO named WAHLI/Friends of the Earth Indonesia) could not remember if it had been 3 or 5 years since a Westerner had last visited their village, but judging by the look on children’s faces as we passed by, many of the younger residents may never have seen such a sight in their lives.

Our arrival at the home of the village leader inspired a spontaneous gathering of most of the men in the village. From teens to elders, the house quickly filled to capacity with eager, curious faces. The young men howled in laughter at the strange sound of the English language, heard before only in Hollywood films, being spoken in front of them in real life. We drank tea and smoked cigarettes with the men while Lafcadio charmed the crowd and explained what RAN is and what our purpose there was.

Lafcadio and I with the village's leaders while touring their gardens

Our visit took place just one week after the federal government approved Tanjung Alam’s application for Hutan Desa status from the federal Forestry Ministry. Hutan Desa (literally, Village Forest) is a process by which rural forest-based communities can apply to the federal government to reclassify areas of the federal forest estate from “Production Forest” (a designation in perpetual danger of being cleared and converted into pulpwood or palm oil plantations) into a community-based management status.

The community of Tanjung Alam is part of a regional Adat network that consists of 53 villages. Seventeen of these have applied for Hutan Desa status, and 7 have now been approved. While not a perfect system or an ultimate answer to the pervasive land conflicts plaguing Indonesia, the Hutan Desa concept is a welcome ray of hope that offers a model that can provide many oppressed and disenfranchised communities a tool to regain a degree of control over their livelihoods while shielding their forest resources from blanket destruction by faceless international corporations.

The community of Tanjung Alam is perfectly suited for implementing a best-case version of the Hutan Desa model. They have deep roots and an established claim to the area, well developed ethics regarding land use and community rights, and an ability to protect and manage the landscape better than any government or NGO body could pretend to. Officially returning stewardship of the forests and watersheds surrounding the village to the villagers who know them best is clearly the socially and ecologically just thing to do, and also serves to protect the water supply of Jambi and other cities downstream.

Villagers harvesting rice

These mystical, cloud-shrouded slopes are home to the largest remaining population of Sumatran tigers in the world. Located on the buffer zone of the Kerinci Seblat National Park, they also contain five species of monkey and a bewildering cacophony of birds.

The village grounds are an archetype of deep permaculture principles, designed by a people who have inhabited their landscape for dozens of generations. They practice a sophisticated blend of agroforestry that includes hillsides of coffee, elegant groves of cinnamon trees, fields of a leaf they call Niman that is processed into an oil, acres of terraced rice paddies, forests of rubber trees and everywhere a mixture of fruit trees, vegetables, tobacco and other useful edible, commercial and medicinal plants.

The village leaders were proud to take us on a tour of their extensive gardens, displaying first their hand-built wooden water wheel for generating small amounts of electricity through a micro hydro system. We learned how they process the Niman leaf into an oil used in cosmetics and were shown how they harvest, dry and process up to 5 tons of coffee beans per month. Durians are in season in the highlands, and no one heading downhill towards town on foot, motorbike or truck was not loaded to the hilt with the stinky, spiky fruits.

The village uses this hand-built wooden water wheel for micro-hydroelectricity generation

The total picture of a people living well and consciously together, rooted deeply in place, offers a vision of sustainability that resurrects the term from the cynicism often associated with its shallow, trendy ubiquity. As we toured the pastoral beauty of Tanjung Alam’s gardens and groves, our guides pointed across the valley to denuded slopes where a neighboring community had been insufficiently organized and hence not vigilant enough to keep outsiders from plundering for a quick profit.

Our experience in Tanjung Alam complimented and contrasted our other two field visits. The three communities we observed across three provinces of Sumatra are very different and distinct in their composition, their challenges, their needs and their approach to resolving the daunting problems they face. They represent three diverse points along the broad spectrum of the Indonesian forest crisis and each offers its own insights towards guiding the nation past the current quagmire.

One lesson stands out above all others: The fate of the forests, endangered wildlife and our global climate are inextricably intertwined with the fate of the communities who depend on the forests for their survival.

Coffee in front, cinnamon behind, primary rainforest beyond

Any real solutions must simultaneously conserve the forests, protect human rights and provide for the long-term livelihoods of the people who live there. Thankfully, the many allies we met on this trip are earnest young activists who understand and embody this reality. Indonesia desperately needs more stories with happy endings like this one, and it will be the savvy, competent and strategic organizers within Indonesia’s extensive NGO community of grassroots groups that will lead the way in that direction. The channels of communication and coordination are open and I look forward to exploring how RAN can continue to build our support and working relationships with these crucial groups into the future.

RAN forest campaigner Lafcadio Cortesi talks with elders of the village of Siabu in central Sumatra

It’s a good thing RAN’s forest campaigner, Lafcadio Cortesi, speaks Bahasa Indonesian so well. Otherwise I almost certainly would have gotten in the car with the undercover intelligence agent who told me to come with him because he “wanted to practice his English.”

We had just arrived in the small village of Siabu, in the Kampar region of east central Sumatra. Our plan was to meet up with a group of displaced villagers and participate in a land reclamation and planting party. The villagers are engaged in a land conflict with a subsidiary of pulp and paper giant APP, and their plan was to plant crops on their traditional lands and prevent the company from further establishing a pulpwood plantation in the disputed area.

Of the dozens of men milling about when we got out of the car, the first to approach me began asking questions about who I was with, what I was doing there, and the like. It quickly became apparent that the whole group was loading onto their motor bikes and moving to a less public location and we were to follow. We were all meant to meet up at the same place, so I was contemplating jumping in with my gregarious new friend, but Lafcadio said, curtly, “No. Travel with us.”

Not generally a curt fellow, Laf explained when we got in the car that our hosts were concerned the mystery guy was there to gather intelligence, though for whom he was gathering it was not quite clear. This was the first of many lessons and insights I gained that day into just how deeply dark and deranged the situation here has become.

Getting to the designated meeting place required hours of travel on a labyrinth of dirt roads through a 250,000 acre acacia plantation that stretched across the land like an infestation of neatly ordered rows of scrawny twigs. We were made to pass through several check points staffed by security personnel who sported the SOS corporate logo of their employer on a patch on one shoulder and a police badge on the other — a fitting display of the cozy relationship between the security state and the corporations whose interests they serve.

Lafcadio with customary elder Pak Datuk

At the second security post we picked up the Tokoh Adat, or customary elder of the local village, a man called Pak Datuk. The armed guards took the identification cards of our driver and Pak Datuk for safe keeping — and so they’d have leverage over the drive and Pak Datuk if anything untoward were to occur beyond the gate.

The gathering place was a promontory at the edge of the plantation overlooking a post-apocalyptic landscape cleared of all vegetation and scarred by a maze of roads leading nowhere. Later we would learn this spot was chosen because it is within the villagers’ ancestral territory, and is an area they hope to reclaim. It had been decided no planting would occur this day, but a meeting would proceed to discuss community goals and next steps.

About a hundred people had gathered, and our arrival created quite a stir. Half of the group surrounded us and jockeyed with one another to shake our hands and have their pictures taken with us, after which it was insisted that we eat. The group included pockets of animated young men smoking clove cigarettes and blaring pop music from mobile phones, elderly women wearing headscarves, and lots of adult men wearing the weathered look of hard-working farmers whose fortune had not come easily.

In the tense environment of present day rural Sumatran society, the simple act of gathering together on disputed territory is an act of resistance, and the day’s meeting did not go unnoticed. In addition to the undercover character we had met earlier, a group of armed law enforcement personnel — including private security, police officers, and at least one quasi-military looking gentleman — had amassed on the outskirts of the villagers’ assembly.

When Pak Datuk stood to speak, everyone circled and fell silent. He spoke with the elegance and authority of a strong and self-assured leader. From the bits whispered to me in translation I understood that he began by stating that his people are bound by three laws. In order, they are God, custom, and then the government. He said the goal of his people is to take action to reclaim their land rights and ancestral territory.

He said his people were given rights by their ancestors and that it is their duty to protect those rights so they can be passed on to their children before they are lost. He said they are bound to be peaceful, to be safe and not to use violence. He said it is crucial they maintain their unity in the face of those who would divide them. He finished each series of pronouncements with the question “Ingat?” (Remember?) or Mengar ti? (Do you understand?) to which the crowd in unison responded “Ingat!” or “Mengar ti!”

A canal cuts through a former village site and elephant habitat

When he was finished speaking, other village leaders spoke and details were discussed about what to plant and how to collect and distribute funds to make the provocative planting project possible. When the group disbanded, we drove away with an older, well-dressed village member named Pak Sudirman who guided us to the site a few miles away where their original village stood.

As we passed through a sea of sterile oil palm plantations, crudely dug canals and dry, exposed earth, he told us how rich this land had once been, not so long ago. Before his people were forcibly evicted by the military in the late 1980’s, their riverside territory had been habitat for elephants and monkeys, and his village practiced a sustainable form of mixed agroforestry that included crops like rubber trees, cassava, banana, chile, papaya, durien, mango, rambutan, jack fruit and a variety of vegetables.

In a darkly ironic twist, the only natural forest still standing in the area was saved because it was made part of a military bombing range. Entering this verdant forest felt like a full sensory massage. The sight of the towering trees, the feel of the moist air, the smell of dank richness, the sound of birdsong and the buzz of insects stood in stark contrast to the vacuous devastation just outside.

Back at the village where the day began, we shared smokes with the village’s men in the home of the traditional village chief. Pak Datuk told us in clear and passionate terms what the demands of his people are for APP, the company behind their conflict. He said the company never asked for their permission to use the land that belongs to them and they have never received any benefit. His demand is for APP to return the land to the community. He followed by asking that customers of APP stop buying products that come from their lands until the important issues of their traditional rights are resolved.

Laf speaks with the village's chief

The stories of these people and this place are a microcosm of what’s happening all over Sumatra and  in Borneo and the rest of Indonesia and Malaysia. People are displaced, forests are cleared, ecosystems are destroyed. Repeat. And until APP and their ilk among the all-powerful logging behemoths are convinced that business as usual is not in their own or Indonesia’s interest, these injustices will continue. Our meetings this week with allies and community leaders are a piece in the growth of a larger movement that is gaining momentum here and at home in the US. Companies like APP can no longer expect to act with impunity.

Dr. Bayu Wirayudha, founder and CEO of Friends of National Parks Foundation

I’ve only been in Indonesia for a few days and already I’ve heard multiple accounts of intimidation, corruption, kidnapping, torture and even murder suffered by our allies here who have been bold enough to speak out and resist the destruction of their forests and villages by palm oil and pulp and paper companies. But I am going to save those dark tales for another post and start this one with a happier story.

I didn’t expect to encounter evidence of RAN’s work in Indonesia until after I finished a three-day personal trip to the island paradise of Bali. After that, my plans were to immerse myself in two weeks of conservation-related meetings and site visits on the islands of Java and Sumatra — that’s what I traveled across the world for. But a close friend of mine who knows of my strong passion for birds told me that while I was in Bali I had to make a point of seeking out Dr. Bayu Wirayudha, the man widely credited with rescuing the iconic and critically endangered Bali Starling from the very brink of extinction (a truly incredible and ongoing story of its own).

It turns out Bayu is also the founder and CEO of Friends of the National Parks Foundation (FNPF), an inspiring organization that I learned has received funds from RAN on more than one occasion. I spoke at length with Bayu at his office/educational center/activist-organizing hub on the outskirts of the village of Ubud, Bali, and learned why FNPF is exactly the sort of frontline ally RAN is proud to support.

It’s important to understand that the threats facing the rainforests and communities of Indonesia are extreme and the challenges encountered by those trying to stem the destruction are immense and extraordinarily complex. Corruption is pervasive throughout the government and corporate spheres, and challenging those entrenched interests often means put your life on the line. The power wielded by the forces of profit and politics are almost beyond comprehension when viewed from the perspective of a villager fighting for their home or a conservationist struggling to save a species from extinction. So it takes some serious savvy to make headway against the seemingly unstoppable tide of forest conversion and community displacement sweeping rapidly across the country.

FNPF staff educate villagers about the importance of conservation

Bayu and his team understand that human rights, cultural survival and biodiversity preservation are inextricably linked in Indonesia. Conservationists here have learned the hard way that without the endorsement and involvement of local communities, desperate and disenfranchised villagers inevitably return to a slash and burn, extraction-based existence, dooming even the best-funded and well-intentioned conservation initiatives to failure. The approach of FNPF is a sophisticated melding of wildlife conservation, habitat protection and community development. Bayu praised RAN for supporting his organization’s vision at a time when other donors were unwilling to invest in such far-sighted plans.

With RAN’s help, FNPF has spent years gaining the trust of communities surrounding the huge and species-rich but conflict-ridden Tanjung Puting National Park on the island of Borneo. More than half of the forested land within the park has already been degraded by logging and agricultural encroachment. They built this trust partially by providing the villages with their first-ever cows and chickens, and the know-how to tend them for sustenance. At the same time, FNPF staff helped the villagers establish agroforestry operations with crops like rubber trees and agar wood that provide sustainable income while maintaining high levels of biological diversity. FNPF is also training local villagers to offer outstanding ecotourism opportunities in and around the National Park, giving locals a way to benefit from this lucrative emerging industry (before, ecotourism profits went exclusively to outsiders).

Villagers learn how to propagate key tree species

Bayu relayed a heartening story about how local palm oil workers now call his staff at FNPF when an orangutan enters the palm plantations, so the animal can be relocated unharmed, whereas previously they would have killed them on sight or called the notorious Forestry Ministry, which would have done the same.

These hard-fought, piecemeal advances may be just a drop in the ocean compared to the immensity of devastation underway across Indonesia’s rainforests, but they provide preciously rare living proof that a cooperative way forward is possible from the heinous mess that exists now. People like Bayu, and projects like those of FNPF, are like saplings rising up from a clear cut forest. With enough light and nourishment, it is these fresh starts that can take root and provide shade for others to do the same.

Well we gathered in NYC here, and started this ‘Earthalujah Church.’

Why? Well we’re agnostics or what are we — over-cultured — and something about this time in which we live, with hate-crimes against the Earth from one side and freak storms rising from the other…  And we are caught in the middle waiting for death in a different way than we used to. We love the gift of life, but haven’t had the chance to thank life for it. And then it occurs to us that nobody is really shouting EMERGENCY! down in the empty Tahrir Square with enough force.

Don’t we like it here?  The whole culture is sort of listless now.  It’s Waiting for Godot time. So if gratitude to the Earth comes in songs, and rituals and prayers… Maybe the Ear can give us more juice for that shout we all need to inhale and blow at our fellow humans. Earthalujah!

Thanks Reverend!

I picked up a RAN pamphlet while attending an animal rights conference in Oregon, and was very much taken with their bite-back approach in challenging large corporations. I was inspired by the work RAN was doing to support Indigenous rights and communities. Nothing is more valuable, sacred, and vulnerable than our environment and the species that we share with it. I feel RAN does an amazing job through direct action, my personal favorite, and get corporations to adopt better business practices.

Environmentalism with Teeth

RAN has caught my eye with their commanding and tenacious energy to their campaigns. Not only is RAN able to find ways in which to take action on the issues facing our precious planet, but they turn that action into something exciting and compelling. RAN will get the job done!

About Kitty

In middle school I was exposed to a side of the food industry that I had never seen before through the video “Meet Your Meat.” This video opened my eyes to the animal abuse in the production of industrial foods and changed my life. I went from an apathetic and jaded teenager to an inspired and unstoppable activist for animals and the environment.

Since then, volunteering has become my favorite thing to do. I have recently started cleaning people’s houses in my free time in my efforts to support groups that work to protect the environment, the rights of animals and humans alike. So far I’ve raised over $700.

When not volunteering I simply delight in protesting, meeting new people, jogging, and cooking up a vegan storm in the kitchen!

But the Aguarico now holds a very different meaning for the Cofán and for Emergildo Criollo, a leader in the Cofán community. Emergildo is the father of four children and grandfather of thirteen. Two decades ago, he lost two sons after they bathed in and drank the contaminated water of the Aguarico. (Read Emergildo’s story.)

Emergildo taking us across the Aguarico to Cofán Dureno

Our friend Emergildo has travelled to the United States and our home state of California many times to face Chevron executives and urge the company to clean up its billions of gallons of toxic oil waste in Ecuador’s Amazon rainforest (watch Emergildo’s video message to Chevron CEO John Watson). Today we travelled to Emergildo’s home, the small Indigenous community of Cofán Dureno.

Dureno is home to some eight hundred Cofán. The island is a mere thirty-seven square miles, a small fraction of the Cofán’s traditional territory. To reach Dureno, we boarded a motorized wooden canoe and crossed the Aguarico.

The Cofán — just like the Siona, Secoya, Quichua, Huoarani and Tetete peoples — once lived traditionally, in harmony with their environment. The forest was their pharmacy, their market, and their place of spiritual renewal and worship. But all this changed when Chevron (then Texaco) began oil-drilling operations in this once pristine rainforest in 1972. The detonation of explosives during seismic testing, the introduction of heavy drilling machinery, and the construction of miles of roads destroyed thousands of square miles of forests, medicinal plants, and food supplies.

Meanwhile, oil production jobs provided a reason for the mass migration of colonos, who strained the natural resources and forced local peoples off their traditional lands. Women became targets of sexual crimes. And the Aguarico, like many other waterways, was poisoned.

When Chevron drilled for oil in this region, the company had no regard for local life and took no preventative or protective measures. During the course of three decades of drilling, Chevron deliberately and knowingly dumped billions of gallons of toxic oil waste into the Aguarico and other waterways. Emergildo remembers how sheets of crude oil would blanket the Aguarico, how he would be ankle-deep in oil when walking along the riverbed. He also remembers how company workers outright lied about the dangers of crude oil exposure.

We met Emergildo’s grandchildren and some of the Cofán women and elders while in Dureno. Many of the women make beaded jewelry that they sell in the adjacent oil town of Lago Agrio. Lago Agrio (Sour Lake) is the boomtown that sprang up around Texaco’s first oil well in the region. It was Texaco that gave the town its name. (Chevron bought Texaco in 2001.)

Chevron/Texaco may have packed up its bags and left the region in 1992, but its toxic legacy is palpable. Thousands of people still lack potable water, and thousands have been stricken with oil-related cancers and other illnesses. More than 900 open-air oil waste pits built by Texaco have been abandoned and continue to leach life-threatening toxins into the environment. We’ll visit some of these waste pits tomorrow.

As we boarded the canoe for our return trip, we waved back to Emergildo’s grandchildren. Emergildo already lost two sons, but the thirty thousand Indigenous peoples and small farmers who have been impacted by Chevron’s contamination and who undauntedly continue to fight for justice are working to ensure this generation will have a brighter and cleaner future. And we won’t let up on Chevron until that happens.

Now comes news that ACORN is shutting down their operations. In case you don’t remember, ACORN became the Republican party’s target of choice in branding then-candidate Obama as a radical community organizer. Not surprisingly, the high-profile slurs and accusations had the desired impact on ACORN’s bottom line and made it impossible for them to go on (although affiliates in New York and California will continue to operate under new names).

While I mourn the passing of this steadfast advocate for fair, affordable housing, I’m reminded of the immortal words of Joe Hill, “Don’t waste time mourning, organize!”

And that got me thinking about the US Social Forum (USSF) coming up in Detroit this June. The USSF seeks to build “a powerful multi-racial, multi-sectoral, inter-generational,
diverse, inclusive, internationalist movement that transforms this country and changes history.” It’s an opportunity for movements to come together and collaborate on strategies to create a society that won’t tolerate racism and homophobia, that recognizes housing as a basic human right, and that protects the interests of people, communities and the planet we all rely on. Sounds like something we could really use right about now!

Today, one of my heroes and major influences crossed over to the other side. Howard Zinn –radical historian, civil rights acivist, anti-war activist, direct action activist, thinker, doer, fighter for justice and educator- passed away today at 87.

I first read “A People’s History of the United States” early on and it changed my life. It was an eye opener and a page turner. As Matt Damon in “Good Will Hunting” said “If you want to read a real history book, read Howard Zinn’s ‘People History of the United States.’ That book will knock you on your ass.”

It told the history of the downtrodden, the oppressed and regular people opposing illegitimate authority, not the government, the politicians or the wealthy. It told me that history wasn’t about the Rockefellers or Kennedys, as the elite few would have us believe, but about those in struggle for justice, and often survival.

As a professor at Spellman, Zinn encouraged his students to request books from the segregated public libraries and helped coordinate sit-ins at downtown cafeterias. As a World War II vet and Boston University professor, Zinn organized actively against the war in Vietnam and was arrested several times. At Boston University, he supported labor organizing and feuded with the university professor, John Silber. Direct action was a philosophy that Zinn carried throughout his life

As direct action became a philosphy in my life, Zinn’s histories and actions have been a guide. As a historian that taught community college for six years, his work was the basis for my lectures. As an aspiring dissident, Howard Zinn’s life remains a role model.

Let’s not mourn Howard Zinn, he had a long life surrounded by loved ones where he changed the lives of millions through his teaching, writing and activism. Instead let’s continue his work and spirit and in the words of Mother Jones “Pray for the dead and fight like hell for living.“

In honor of Dr. Zinn, I thought I would share a bit of his writing that I have kept on hand to continually remind me about the true role of citizens. I keep this on my desktop to ward off the politics of compromise and inspire me to always speak for what is right not just what is winnable.

This comes from an article he wrote during the Bush Era about the timetable for ending the Iraq war, but I have found it fitting on many occasions. And particularly just before President Obama delivers the State of the Union it is something worth holding close.

We are not politicians, we are citizens. Let the politicians advocate half-way measures if they choose, but only after they have felt the full force of citizens who speak for what is right, not what is winnable in a shameful timorous Congress. Timetables for withdrawal are not only morally reprehensible in the case of a brutal occupation (would you give a thug who invaded your house, smashed things up, and terrorized your children a timetable for withdrawal?) but logically nonsensical. If our troops are preventing civil war, helping people, controlling violence, then why withdraw at all? If they are in fact doing the opposite — provoking civil war, hurting people, perpetuating violence — they should withdraw as quickly as ships and planes can carry them home. If Congress thinks it must compromise, let it. But we should not encourage that. We should speak our minds fully, boldly and say what is right, whatever they decide to do..

I would add this: To me it is tantamount to the abolitionists accepting a two-year timeline for ending slavery, while giving more money to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act .

There is an understandable predisposition for reasonable people to compromise, but there are compromises which are real,and others with are surrenders. See the new movie THE WIND THAT SHAKES THE BARLEY. The Irish rebels were offered a compromise, which gave them the Irish Free State, something palpable, a ledge to stand on from which to fight for more, which they have done. There is nothing palpable in this “compromise”, only a promise whose fulfilment is in the hands of George Bush, and meanwhile funds the ongoing slaughter in Iraq.

-Howard Zinn

I was working at Michigan Citizens Lobby as a regional organizer and part-time canvasser, working to stop the cost overruns from the Fermi II nuclear plant from getting passed on to consumers and for increased access to health care (yes, we’ve been fighting that particular battle for more than two decades). That summer, I had an opportunity to go to a gathering where I picked up the t-shirt. Dolores Huerta was a featured speaker, and she set me on the course I would follow for a lifetime. When she got us shouting “Si se puede!” there was no doubt it was true!

Now we’ve got a community organizer in the White House, and I still can’t imagine a better career path. After 20 years, I still get excited about working every day to effect change, and I also get to train and support new activists as they get their first taste of the power and thrill that comes from seeing that we really can make a difference. What a joy!

Indie rock sensation Trevor Hall has been an avid supporter of the Rainforest Action Network for many years, performing at a benefit concert for the organization in San Francisco in 2005.

Now – Trevor and his label, Vanguard Records are teaming up with ThinkIndie.com to support RAN with some of the profits from the sales of his new album, launching July 28th.

For the first week of the album’s launch, from July 28th to August 2nd, Vanguard Records and ThinkIndie.com will donate a portion of the proceeds from Trevor Hall’s album sales to the Rainforest Action Network (RAN).

Trevor Hall’s self-titled Vanguard debut, produced by Marshall Altman (Matt Nathanson, Kate Voegele, Marc Broussard), embodies a soulfulness, depth and passion far beyond his 22 years. Trevor combines a unique musical mix of reggae and acoustic rock that serves as a landscape for his thought provoking, inspiring lyrics. This old soul infuses his songs with a deep sense of spirituality, as evidenced in the lead single “Unity,” written and performed with his friend Matisyahu.

Click here to get some Trevor Hall from the ThinkIndie site, and support RAN at the same time.

Thanks Trevor!

A 49-year-old man has died after falling through the ice on a tailings pond at a former open-pit gold mine in the Northwest Territories.The RCMP say the man was taking photographs at the Colomac Mine site on Sunday, but didn’t return. Two employees noticed his vehicle still parked at the tailings pond and then saw a camera sitting at the edge of an open patch of water. The man’s body was found under the ice after a brief search. The RCMP are investigating, but say foul play is not suspected. The Colomac Mine, about 220 kilometres northwest of Yellowknife, operated for several years in the 1990s, but was shut down in 1997.

Tailings ponds just like this are a major by-product of the tar sands projects in Northern Alberta – where the population is far greater than in the Northwest Territiories.

Guess water that polluted doesn’t freeze….