For us to maintain our way of living, we must tell lies to each other and especially to ourselves. The lies are necessary because, without them, many deplorable acts would become impossibilities.
— The Culture of Make Believe, Derrick Jensen
Part One — I am scrambling to get this first part of the Earth Day two-part article series up and running while I work hard Friday night to write the second, more sobering part of what Earth Day 2019 is and, unfortunately, what it is not.
I like going local by looking at global issues. I will talk about the reality of recycling products as a big scam. I will write about all this chatter from millionaires like Naomi Klein and now the leadership of the so-called alternative web journalist site, The Intercept. I watched the interview and the live-illustration by Molly Crabtree, “We Can Be Whatever We Have the Courage to See,” which, according to Klein’s millionaire husband, Avi Lewis, has had 4 million hits already as of April 18, 2019.
Hits on the internet, and this Lewis fellow declares this as a huge win for Mother Earth, for “the movement”, and, surely, a grand win for the New Green Deal. This can be so dishearenting to hear the idiocy around these moments and digital expressions. Earth systems are in total collapse, and it’s more than some Canadian writer’s world view or the Holly-wood-ization of the world seen through the looking glass of the two dirtiest countries’ liberal spokespeople: Canada and USA.
Daily, it becomes more and more delusional on all aisles of the political manure pile, but also on all fronts of mainstream media and fake alternative media. The Press is out to lunch, man, big time. Having Today’s (4/18) Democracy Now:
We can be whatever we have the courage to see.” That’s the message of a stunning new video released by The Intercept, Naomi Klein and award-winning artist Molly Crabapple Wednesday that imagines a future shaped by the Green New Deal. It’s called “A Message from the Future with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.” The film was co-written by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez herself, along with Avi Lewis, the co-founder of The Leap. We speak with Avi Lewis and award-winning artist Molly Crabapple about the power of art to create social change.
Crabtree’s new thing is as follows:
As an award-winning animator, she has pioneered a new genre of live-illustrated explainer journalism, collaborating with Jay Z, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, The ACLU and The Equal Justice Initiative to tell stories about America’s prison system and history of institutional racism.
“Live-illustrated explainer journalism”! Wow. That’s a whole other book to write about, what this all means to humanity’s greater and greater loosening of its grip on sanity. In any case, the part two of my Earth Day hit will look at this new-fangled mixed up and same old Capitalism loving soft shoe bull crap lying about what has to be done to mitigate a world without ice. Because that’s the fact, Jack, so bullet trains and cool ass urban jobs and folks like Naomi Klein and Avi Lewis, a Canadian self-proclaimed Jewish couple with Jewish children, well, they are living the good millionaires’ liberal lifestyles, and, the revolution and the rebellion will not live in the belly of the controlled opposition which they are very centered inside.
Interesting the power centers in Canada vis-a-vis the family lines of both Klein and Lewis, from Wikipedia, really are at the top of elites. I bring this up to point out that the narrative around climate change and the New Green Deal and poverty and envirogees and starvation and physically harming toxins in this Mad Mad Mad World of Consumerism CANNOT be shunted into elitist and vain-glory liberal and pro-Capitalist politics or centers of non-profit gobbledygook:
Avi Lewis is the great grandson of Moshe Losz (Lewis), an outspoken member of the Jewish Bund who left Svislach, Poland (today Belarus), after being interrogated by the Russians and threatened with death or the Gulag for his political activity. He left for Montreal in 1921, with his wife Rose (née Lazarovitch) and three children. Avi Lewis is the grandson of former federal NDP leader David Lewis and the son of former Ontario NDP leader and diplomat Stephen Lewis and journalist Michele Landsberg. Avi Lewis is married to journalist and author Naomi Klein; his sister Ilana Landsberg-Lewis is the executive director of the Stephen Lewis Foundation.
Naomi Klein was born in Montreal, Quebec, and brought up in a Jewish family with a history of peace activism. Her parents were self-described “hippies” who moved to Montreal from the U.S. in 1967 as war resisters to the Vietnam War. Her mother, documentary film-maker Bonnie Sherr Klein, is best known for her anti-pornography film Not a Love Story. Her father, Michael Klein, is a physician and a member of Physicians for Social Responsibility. Her brother, Seth Klein, is director of the British Columbian office of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.
Before World War II, her paternal grandparents were communists, but they began to turn against the Soviet Union after the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact in 1939. In 1942, her grandfather, an animator at Disney, was fired after the 1941 strike,[ and had to switch to working in a shipyard instead. By 1956 they had abandoned communism. Klein’s father grew up surrounded by ideas of social justice and racial equality, but found it “difficult and frightening to be the child of Communists”, a so-called red diaper baby.
Klein’s husband, Avi Lewis, was born into a well-connected political and journalistic family; he works as a TV journalist and documentary filmmaker. The couple’s only child, son Toma, was born on June 13, 2012. (Wikipedia)
I continue to question the elite’s role in furthering the decline of people and third world societies, and those playing around with apocalypse (art, education, performing, documentaries, non-profit complex) and those seeing green as the new non-profit profit industry, or green washing or green pornography thing, or green whacking or green is the new black towering inferno of lies, as in profits for all and great new renewable energy jobs and business pretty much as usual thinking.
You see, I just taught at a Toledo, Oregon, school, actually both HS and elementary schools. I will write about that, too. Youth that are really bad, according to one teacher (math) who hails from New Jersey but went to school in Massachusetts, taught there, Vermont, Eugene, OR, Bullhead City, AZ, and now Toledo. She told me that hands down this high school was the worst place she ever taught at.
She’s got 14 or more years under her belt as a traveling teacher, and now she lives in Newport with her highly-paid (compared to Toledo or Newport wages) husband who works for Oregon State University (average undergraduate/grad tuition — for a state school in a dumpy town, Corvallis, is: $11,166 for Oregon residents and $30,141 for out of State students and the 2019 graduate school tuition & fees are $14,061 for State residents and $24,483 for others). Interesting, this 50 year old-ish teacher with a middle class wage and state retirement portfolio, and a second wage earner in the mix, and they are white, so there is probably inherited well in the mix, telling me, a part-timer, 62, precarious worker (a substitute teacher, come on!), that in her limited scope, Toledo, Oregon (not Ohio) has the worse students in both Junior/Senior High School in her realm of teaching.
This town is Koch Brothers-polluted with a paper-mill run by Georgia Pacific which is owned by the billionaire Koch brothers who despise poor people, hence the dirty water, the dirty air, the dangerous jobs and the low pay for parents and those future workers barely getting through high school (many want to quit and go to Jobs Corps or get their GED’s while pumping gas).
What makes these students “the most destructive to school property and the most disruptive and disrespectful,” according to the East Coast teacher, we’ll talk about that too, soon, in a future article. Or what makes a teacher declare that in the public school realm, that too will be addressed.
You know, all that paper the Klein-Lewis family uses for their copy and books, manuscript and TV scripts, etc., hmm, where does that shit come from? What are the consequences of all that paper use/misuse? All that virgin paper used in Congress, in political halls of injustice, and, yes, colleges and PK12? Really, come on — these children are coughing up a storm from the pulp mill pollution. These youth I talked with several times are broken and need alternatives to classrooms with broken lights, peeling paint, and rows of desks — they are so down on themselves, so not confident they will go anywhere in life, so traumatized and broken, so chronically seized with negativity and put-downs and self-loathing . . . or self-delusional.
I guarantee, Earth Day to them is a day off, since it falls on the bizarre holiday of Easter Sunday/take off/Monday!
Back to Part One —
Local Environmentalists Meet Inside for some Presentations — A Far-Cry from the Earth Days I Organized in Spokane!
Celebration in Newport is April 22, at the public Library
The first “earth” day started really with nuts and bolts issues focusing on stopping air and water pollution, using a more sexy crisis as a platform for marching: awareness around the annual increasing depletion of whale populations worldwide. That was in 1970, and the iconic blue and humpback whales were plastered all over posters and some were paper mâché giant icons that led the marchers on a pathway of civic engagement and political action tied to the planet’s degraded ecosystems, including those in cities.
On April 22, 1970, millions of people took to the streets to bring voice to the planet and hold corporations responsible in large part for the negative impacts of 150 years of industrial development.
In the U.S. and around the world, smog alerts were common, turning deadly. This fortified leading scientists and health experts to connect growing air, water, food and soil pollution to developmental delays in children, respiratory ailments and cancers in both young and old.
Almost 50 years ago — biologists supported by universities that were not so beholden to corporate influence and censorship — proved global biodiversity was in decline as a result of the heavy use of pesticides and other pollutants. We were just beginning as citizens to see how timber cutting and plowing over the rain-forests of the world for animal feed crops – to just name a few heavy-handed human scale degradations – could exponentially expand creating a much different – and lesser — world.
Those big events across the globe, especially the first earth day in Washington DC, pushed politicians, media and the average citizen to become aware of ecological challenges. The US Congress and President Nixon responded to the pressure, and in July of the same year, they created the Environmental Protection Agency, as well as significant environmental laws such as the Clean Water Act and the Endangered Species Act, among many.
For Lincoln County – with three branch campuses of Oregon Coast Community College, and with the OSU Hatfield Center and a plethora of environmental and conservation groups, 2019 Earth Day is more like a whimper than a roar . . . a pebble splashing in the big blue Pacific Ocean.
It’s a huge body of water now hobbled with acidification fueled by the world’s oceans absorbing 93 percent of all carbon dioxide expelled through fossil fuel burning and forest burning.
Hypoxia, or dead zones, buffet the oceans around here, and from time to time, these oxygen-squeezed sections have huge marine species die-off’s. Sometimes fish like halibut just flee the waters nowhere to be found.
Towns like Newport, Lincoln City, Depoe Bay, Waldport and Yachats depend on whale watching, beach tourism, sport fishing and, of course, commercial fishing, yet we have significant issues tied to clear-cutting forests up to the ocean (or Highway 101); solid waste (bio-waste) dispersal on land and into watersheds; and significant fracturing of natural ecosystems through construction, road building and dike deployment to “hold back” natural sea and freshwater flooding. Our estuaries were once amazing natural systems of biological and hydrologic ebb and flow.
Interestingly, the Earth Day theme for the big groups organizing it last year was “End Plastic Pollution.” Many organizations – thousands – were working on ending single-use plastics and promoting alternatives to fossil fuel-based materials, as well as pushing for 100 percent recycling of plastics, corporate and government accountability, and changing human behavior concerning plastics.
That has become the strategy of non-profits and grassroots groups – educating citizens so they can become active players in demanding governments and corporations control and clean-up plastic pollution.
Most environmental issues, whether it’s stopping the slaughter of whales or curbing pesticide use, go to the core of the topic at hand by looking for frameworks from which to regulate. Part of the Earth Day celebrations I have been involved in as a coordinator in Spokane, Auburn and El Paso included passionate and knowledge voices who have lead movements, written books, directed documentaries and risked their lives to stop wanton destruction of, say, the Amazonian rain-forest.
Yes, getting entire groups of people and communities (including the colleges I taught at and for which I acted as sustainability coordinator) to take personal responsibility for whichever consumptive practice is producing more and more negative environmental effects, such as plastics, involves educating them on how to live a life of reducing, refusing, reusing, recycling and removing.
In one more year, 2020, the 50th anniversary of earth day arrives, but this year’s theme is Protect our Species. That includes the threatened and endangered species that are both rare, like the white rhino, snow leopard or the killer whale pod living in the Puget Sound, and once ubiquitous like butterflies, turtles, lizards, what have you.
However, there are more threads to the environmental quilt that are not just frayed, but outright missing in huge patches.
We are losing many insect species, and birds around the world are becoming fewer in terms of sheer numbers and diversity. Writer and researcher Elizabeth Kolbert made popular the science community’s assessment that we are in the Sixth Mass Extinction.
Kolbert:
Regarding the Anthropocene, on some level that’s neither here nor there. You could say that a meteor strike is natural in the sense that it’s part of the cosmos or whatever. But a meteor strike is unusual, and its effect is an unusual and devastating one for many other species. So I don’t think whether we are “natural” or not is the issue. Obviously, we’re having a very dramatic impact on the planet and on other species. And if you want to say that’s natural, fine. And if you want to say it’s unnatural, fine. We need to decide whether we like the impact we’re having, not whether we’re natural or not.
I am pretty new to the Central Oregon Coast—as in four months. Part of my journey into communities is I get to know the people, the systems within community structures – especially services tied to youth, aging, poverty and social justice – and the built and ecological environments.
I’m teaching PK12 in the schools. I just became a member of both Surfrider and the American Cetacean Society. I also am closely tied to Oregon’s writing communities, and my hope is to get more involved in the ones out here on the coast.
I’ve met some dedicated people on microplastic beach clean-ups and the big SOLVE beach clean-up. I’ve made an effort to listen to subject matter experts in order to glean from them knowledge I need to move forward as writer and activist.
I posed four fundamental questions to many environmental and conservation-minded people, tied to the value, meaning and effectiveness of Earth Day awareness and celebration campaigns —
- Students ask, “What’s one thing I can do for the environment?” Give us your best answer here.
- Earth Day is going on 50 years in 2020. What is one big issue — and why — you are concerned about that needs addressing not only in the USA/Lincoln County but globally?
- What is one big change you have seen to your community you’ve been in the past few years tied to the environment?
- Tell us your favorite or most memorable time in “wilderness” or “nature.”
For Charlie Plybon, Oregon Policy Manager of Surfrider Foundation, his eye is on individual habits and consumption choices: “Consider the source and eventual fate of your purchases and consumption habits – think about that before you buy it. From foods to plastics, we need to understand the full impacts of what we purchase and consume. Buy local, reduce consumption or avoid “single-use”, compost, grow food and plant trees.”
It makes sense to look at the area’s youth as future leaders in the movement to stop the pollution and mitigate the effects of global warming. Martin Desmond, 67, is a volunteer for Citizens Climate Lobby and has been in Newport for six years. He states: “The most effective action that students can take is to become involved with getting carbon reduction legislation passed at the local, state, and federal levels.”
For someone who has been here on the coast for 46 years, Scott Rosin, 70, has a simple answer for students to abide by:
Be aware of your effect on the environment every waking minute and act accordingly in a positive manner. If you can transcend to effective action instead of bogus rationalizations or despair, do so.
While Earth Day can be a day of celebration and self-congratulatory homilies, I know false hope, greenwashing (using environmental and ecological language to make money and still not stop pollution and degradations), and all those adults in the room telling youth and activists to “just take baby steps” will not turn the tide, so to speak, on the great melting of polar and glacial ice. We are talking about scientists who are independently looking at a world without ice in the coming hundred to three hundred years.
For 42-year-old Plybon, with 19 years as a resident of South Beach, he is concerned about several big issues the country and Lincoln County have to face. Again, this earth day story is not for the faint of heart: “Climate change and water,” Plybon stated. “The inhabitability of our earth will be the challenge of the next generations – that’s not an environmental issue, that’s an everybody issue. Today’s kids are asking what next, will we have a place to live?”
Rosin, on the other hand, goes right back to the plastics on the beaches and in the oceans, which now account for millions of marine birds perishing as well as turtles, seals and sea lions, whales and dolphins choking or starving to death. Every apex predatory in the ocean – those that we end up eating – has microplastics in their blood and flesh.
“Plastic pollution in the environment and particularly the ocean is a death sentence for most animals larger than mice, as surely as the Yucatan Meteor was sixty-six million years ago. The difference is that event and outcome (to channel T. S. Eliot) was practically instantaneous (a bang,) whereas what we face will take years (a whimper.)”
Celebrating wilderness is probably the best bet for any Earth Day participant. Get out in the woods, on the mountaintops, in the rivers and ocean. Remember those powerful spiritual moments in nature and then fight for those same memories for future generations to experience.
For Plybon, making large connections to one species has been amazing. “Fishing in Alaska with my dad — behind the big sockeye run — for trout, everything makes sense. My family and existence, the idea of ‘salmon nation,’ the connections of the forest and wildlife to a single species’ migration and reproduction make this world feel fragile and inexplicably connected.”
Desmond too has family memories about deep connections to nature:
We took our grandkids to Yellowstone several years ago when Lillian was four years old and Evan was one and a half years old. While Yellowstone is known for its unique geothermal features and large numbers of bison, elk, grizzly bears, and wolves, our Evan got the most pleasure out of watching ground squirrels crawl up to his shoes while we were illegally feeding them. For Lillian, she remembers swimming near Mammoth where a hot spring pours into Gardiner River. Our granddaughter Lillian has now collected 12 junior ranger badges from national and state parks.
Finally, anyone working hard on conservation and fighting to restore and preserve the environment can get philosophical, as Rosin did when I asked him about his most memorable time in wilderness: “The illusion of the ‘natural’ life I believed I was once living has evaporated to the point I that I can no longer mentally conjure it. Once, respite only required paddling beyond the breakers and keeping my back to the shore. Now I know what floats around me.”
Here, for a list of Monday’s Newport speakers:
Citizens’ Climate Lobby – Newport Group and 350 Oregon Central Coast will be sponsoring an Earth Day celebration from 6:30 pm to 8:30 pm, Monday, April 22nd at the Newport Public Library.
Mark Saelens, District Manager for the Solid Waste District of Lincoln County, will speak about the county’s recycling and sustainability efforts. Saelens is a former Newport City Councilor.
Martin Desmond, volunteer for Citizens’ Climate Lobby – Newport group, will give an update of HB 2020, the carbon reduction bill that is moving through the Oregon State Legislature. The Joint Committee on Carbon Reduction is expected to pass out the bill on Earth Day. Desmond will briefly speak about the development of climate action plans for Lincoln County.
Rio Davidson, owner of Cascade Coast Solar, will discuss the potential of solar energy installation in commercial and residential homes in Lincoln County. Cascade’s solar systems typically pay for themselves and start saving money on energy bill in seven years to ten years.
Jason Gonzales, the Forest and Watershed Campaign Organizer of Oregon Wild, will speak about impacts to forests in the Oregon Coast Range. Gonzales grew up near Sierra Nevada mountains, exploring the granite domes, freezing rivers, and giant pines on public lands around Yosemite National Park.
Aimee Thompson of Thompson’s Sanitary Services will discuss current recycling and disposal procedures. Thompson’s is offering free compost, Saturday April 20 near its main office, 7450 NE Avery Street, Newport, in celebration of Earth Day while supplies last, limited to one pick-up load per person.
Organizations that will have informational tables include Oregon Wild, Cascade Coast Solar, Thompson’s Sanitary Services, Lincoln County Community Rights, Friends of Yaquina Lighthouse, Oceana Natural Foods Co-Op, Citizens Climate Lobby – Newport group and 350 Oregon Central Coast. Light refreshments will be served.
We will also be serving light refreshments. Thanks for your interest.
***
Note: I attempted to get a more “diverse” set of responses from a more diverse set of interviewees — youth, teachers, poor people, tribes people. I wrote the above article for the local Newport Times News, for Friday’s edition (not sure it will make it in). I have to say the new normal is outright fear of answering questions posed to people by writer/journalists — as in fear of reprisals (not sure which ones), fear of being in print media, and many more issues, including not having approval of the various employers to speak as a teacher or tribal member on some environmental board.
I got one woman’s take, late, after my deadline for the local Wednesday and Friday newspaper; I will include her responses here, since I think they are important. Joy also is the Oregon Chapter leader for the American Cetacean Society, for which I just finished a naturalist certification course under her auspices.
1. Every year the most common question I get from students and people I talk with about deep ecology and ecosocialism is,
“What’s one thing I can do for the environment?” Give us your best answer here.
JP: “Everyone can do the 4 R’s: Reduce, Reuse/Repurpose, Recycle, and Rot (compost). Start with number one Reduce. Buy less by buying only what you really need and will use. Choose durable items that will last. Buy gently used, shop at garage sales and thrift stores.”
2. Earth Day is going on 50 years in 2020. What is one big issue — and why — are you concerned about that needs addressing not only in the USA/Lincoln County but globally?
JP: “Our oceans! Over 2/3 of the earth is ocean. The ocean is critically linked to our survival on earth and is under attack in multitudes of ways. Pollution of all types, chemical, industrial, plastic, and coastal development are destroying habitat. Ocean acidification is a huge problem. It negatively impacts the food web as well as fisheries. The world needs to focus on ocean health.”
3. What is one big change you have seen to your community you’ve been in the past 10 years (or more if it’s the same community) tied to the environment?
JP: “I grew up in the Midwest in an area and time where the environment was only looked at as a resource to be used for farming. My children however, grew up in a time and place where they learned to recycle, to compost and garden, and to take walks to pick up garbage while in elementary school. They and their generation learned a better way to take care of the environment. We still have a long way to go but society can make positive change.”
4. Tell us your favorite or most memorable time in “wilderness” or “nature.” A couple of sentences.
JP: “I have so many it is hard to choose just one. I’ve been fortunate to spend time in many environments from deserts to forests to the ocean. I recall hiking along the Umpqua River outside of Roseburg. I was by myself, it was so quiet and peaceful, just the sounds of nature and deer for company. Of course, being surrounded by blue whales is an incredible experience!”
5. Name, age, organization/affiliation, is this your home (where) and for how long? Joy Primrose, 53, Oregon since 1992 — ACS Oregon Chapter President