Many writers have exposed the role architecture plays in controlling public space. Mike Davis discusses how cities have installed public benches designed to discourage sleeping and fenced in public parks. Israeli architect Eyal Weizman has studied the nature of control implicit in Israel’s design of its cities, settlements and highways. Fictionally, China Mieville’s The City and the City is a riveting tale of a future place strikingly reminiscent of today’s occupied Palestine. Most recently, economist and critic David Harvey has contributed a refreshingly new look at the nature of the modern city and, more importantly, why they need to be wrested back from the neoliberal corporate megalith currently trying to buy the world.

Harvey, who has lived in Baltimore, Maryland for the past several decades, places the modern city’s economic role directly in the center of capital’s creation and consumption of surplus. He discusses the claim that cites are the product of the proletarianization of the rural peasantry, pointing to industrial revolutions of the past and the current movement of populations in nations such as China and India from the countryside to existing urban areas and new economic zones created by international capitalism. Furthermore, his text, titled Rebel Cities, provides a look at the growth of so-called shantytowns on the outskirts of some of the world’s largest population centers. These shantytowns are often the focus of raids by military and police forces intent on making it easier for bulldozers behind them to destroy the structures found there. In certain instances, however, the authorities have conceded to the citizens of these shantytowns and given them rights to their homes.

It is from these shantytowns that we can gain inspiration. The people who live in such areas are considered surplus in the world of monopoly capitalism. They have no rights as far as the stock exchanges and bourses of the world are concerned. Yet, because they refuse to accede to this characterization, they will struggle to maintain their shelter, their communities and their human dignity. Like their historical predecessors in the Paris Commune of 1871, this population is determined to make the city a popular and democratic human organism. They are joined by those around the world who in the past couple of years have occupied city squares and parks and demanded a reconceptualization of the city, more democratic control of the urban space, and a reconsideration of who constitutes the working class and, subsequently, who will make the anti-capitalist revolution.

Harvey insists that the only genuine anticapitalist struggle is one with the goal of destroying the existing class relationship. Such a struggle cannot be waged by separating workplace issues from those of the community. Pointing to the classic film The Salt Of the Earth as an example of how the latter scenario might occur, Harvey suggests that the union must view the world of working people as an organic whole. Utility access and costs are workplace issues; childcare and education are too. Affordable housing and food costs are more than secondary concerns. Their role as a means for the capitalist system to take back wages describes their existence as a means for that system to maintain its control on working people. Debt peonage, whether incurred via education and vehicle loans in the advanced capitalist world or incurred via a micro-loan program in the developing nations, is still debt peonage. The increasing cost of post-secondary education throughout the world and the mortgage crisis are both tools of the neoliberal regime to continue the upward motion of capital.

This is a radical book. Its discussion ranges from the workings of the monopoly rent system and the nature of neoliberal capitalism to a call to take back the city. History is combined with economics and a call for serious struggle. With the Paris Commune as his inspiration, David Harvey discusses the positive and negative aspects of the Occupy movement, the squatters’ movements and allied struggles. He presents their historical precedents and he warns against essentially conservative attempts to manipulate such movements into supporting the existing economic reality. He further opines that cooptation by parliamentary elements are proof of these movements success, not their failure. Fundamental to all of this is Harvey’s radical definition of the city as the wellspring of capitalist oppression and also the foundation of resistance to that oppression.

Sometimes these land use, transportation, design review, and economic development meetings in Seattle make me feel as if I had just been pushed out of some policy wonk’s Leer jet 35,000 feet up, without a parachute or O2. They all have these great raster maps and scatter plots, the visual language of geographical information systems, the “urban lingo” to advance their techniques and typology-loving aspirations.

That is the problem – no, isn’t it!  Another group of silo-ed people self-replicating and forcing through with their elitist and non-community participatory design stuff that is the staff of their lives: making money as developers, architects and builders from the Titans of industry like Amazon’s $19.3 billion dollar wonder Jeff Bezos or the bio-tech-Frankencrop monster called Monsanto.

I listen and wonder where all my planning classes and community development practice sessions as a lowly master’s candidate finishing up with an urban planning degree will go when I listen to one wonk after another wonk tell the crowd all these great things about three skyscrapers coming to Seattle’s skyline.

You see, they are  planning only for “use” as opposed to planning for people, and when I ask the lowly city planner questions to this effect, she cites “this isn’t the proper meeting to discuss those issues . . . that public planning process already took place.”

Post modern sensibilities have shunted the sides of the same coin into entirely different realms of emphasis and possibilities. Inevitably, one and most important one  – social planning – gets the short shrift.

What I have learned, all planning activities should serve the needs and interests of people; however, the modern reductionist tendencies have  sluiced the disciplines, professions, and thinking into distinct troughs of specialization. Continually, I run into this attitude on the part of planners (and developers, elected officials, and other community “stakeholders”) that not only follows the money, but takes on the  “land use, not people” approach.

Social dimensions from most planning activities are then stripped away, so the meetings almost always focus on financial (profit risks) , technological, material, and environmental considerations. For any sensible person, we should be fully encompassing the underlying needs and behaviors of human beings. That should apply to ALL planning – community, land use, transportation, education, environmental and agricultural.

There are incredible amounts of data mining these young Turks do in order to make a case for this type of urban development or that sort of transportation corridor. Sometimes this leaves the engaged viewer – public – way off the scale of where they fit in, where communities tie in.

These planning wonks, in their high-tech offices, produce some of the most colorful, detailed and smart-looking reports and plans from their 35,000 foot perches.

One recent case illustrates how planning today – architecture, too – might be working two sides of very different tracks. The project planned for downtown Seattle, the so-called Denny Triangle, is 3.3 million square feet of Amazon.dot office-headquarters buildings, squeezed into the West Lake area, near the other dozen or so Amazon buildings in the area that add up to a million square feet of whatever Amazonians do.

Let’s look at the Seattle Downtown Design Review Board meeting where the public was seated and standing in a packed City Hall room to see for the first time an anchor project for the downtown West Lake area – Amazon’s campus expansion. We’re talking more than 3.3 million square feet, with three 500-foot high rises in an area that has seen in the past 17 years a huge influx of techy types, from IT to biotechnology.

Restaurants have proliferated, including three from notable Tom Douglas. Bar tabs have risen. The price of housing has gone out the roof. The level of hubris inside the offices and at the businesses frequented by these so-called knowledge workers, the misanthropically-dennoted “creative class” of Richard Florida fame (see – Rise of the Creative Class and another, Cities and the Creative Class,  is stupifying.

While the Amazon warehouse fiasco had already been published months earlier in both Lehigh, Pennsylvania’s Morning Call and Mother Jones magazine and then just recently here, by the Seattle Times, this event was attended by mostly planning and architect types.

However, there were a few in attendance unwilling to let Amazon off the hook even at this staid and rather all-business design meeting. Some in the crowd I knew, and I was with them, as well as being there as a private citizen with some planning background. Working Washington – an offshoot of SEIU – positioned around eight activists in the crowd.

The City’s land use planner in attendance, Lisa Ritzick, seemed a bit taken aback by the throng of people hovering over the architectural renderings and maps of the proposed Amazon base that includes a 2,000 seat auditorium. She reiterated the downtown design guidelines would only encompass architectural design elements, and not environmental or community elements, or lack thereof.

The architect, John Savo, representing NBBJ, the same firm that designed the Gates Foundation’s $500 million campus nearby, plowed through these three block locations, discussing with unabashed confidence FARs (floor area ratios), Class One  & Two Pedestrian Street categories, sun pockets, urban rooms, and view blockages.

NBBJ, an international firm, had its Power Point ready and the three dimensional scaled down models, with interchangeable blocks representing three main alternatives/possibilities.

One big contentious issue seemed to be the vacation of alleyways in the design features. Since the zoning permits buildings of 500-foot heights, and since the three blocks are a bit smaller than traditional city blocks, the idea of being a good neighbor played into the NBBJ design work, Savo said.

We’re talking about views of the Puget Sound and Olympics, 3,000 underground parking spaces and thousands of additional people employed by the Internet retailer. NBBJ’s two presenters harped on the idea of small (insignificant) public spaces that would “allow” passage around the three block complexes.

Some in the crowd, during the public discussion, were concerned about what Amazon-NBBJ was doing to either “make or demolish” the community around the proposed sites part of the plan. Pagnesh Parikh, an architect on the Seattle Design Review Board, posited the questions about how NBBJ and Amazon intended to address the effects of the proposed campus site on surrounding buildings and the community.  The query seemed to stump the two NBBJ architects.

Another interested public attendee who works in a building near the proposed site –  which would include demolition of several buildings — was concerned about the large area of effacement on the three high rises and just how inviting the public spaces would be.

My questions were more pointed, as I addressed the Design Review Board to continue pressing several issues:

a) stronger design and architectural features that would create much more public space, both in size and breadth, maybe even green spaces atop two smaller buildings;

b) the issue of how the public could engage in or use the auditorium; and,

c) whether Amazon would consider finding several locations in the Seattle area to site their retail offices and incubators, sort of an economic development model seeding in some strong neighborhoods like Beacon Hill or Rainer Beach that would benefit from Amazon’s presence as a multiplier for housing, retail and activities.

Then, my brothers in arms from Working Washington went at the design review board with humorous questions about Amazon’s business practices tied to recent stories of Amazon warehouses in Pennsylvania and Nevada functioning like sweatshops. Several pressed the architects and Design Review Board to check on the Amazon’s amazingly small annual tax rate of 5.5 percent.

I was wondering where those lingering questions would come from, those tied to the absolutely odd nature of Amazon.dot.com fighting paying sales taxes while bricks and mortar stores keep paying to help fund the very same infrastructure Amazon uses to package and ship their goods. Or where the community activists were to demand more concessions from Amazon to do much better and innovative “things” for the public in these proposed blocks.

As a final note, I take a bit from the Project for Public Places about the problems dealing with high rises:

Tall buildings affect cities in two different ways that have almost nothing to do with each other. One is as sculptural objects framed in the sky, where their impact is artistic or symbolic. The other is where the buildings meet the ground and create either pleasant or oppressive spaces where people walk and congregate. Architects regularly misfire with big buildings that are bad by both measures, but the tendency is to fail more often and more egregiously at street level.

One reason is that it’s fairly difficult to make a 500-foot-high building seem humane and welcoming to a 5-foot-something biped approaching it. The other is that a building’s owners are naturally more concerned with the way the building reads in the skyline, because that’s where its marketable image gets fixed in the public eye.

Seattle’s skyline and view-shed keep changing, and many older timers think its not for the best, no matter how dense the downtown gets.

I spoke with Jason about green washing, what the cities of Vancouver, Chicago, Portland, Seattle, and others are attempting to do with architecture and urban design. We discussed how difficult it is to launch into a larger discussion about quicker, more all-encompassing ways to mitigate, plan for and design livability for a world that some like James Hansen calls, a world without ice.

He just spoke at a BALLE (Business Alliance for Local Living Economies), business conference that brought “together independent business owners and innovators, local living economy entrepreneurs, community investors, government economic development professionals and sustainability leaders.” McLennon understands that restlessness folk in various forms of the sustainability movement are displaying. His book’s main title describes the grumbling and undertow some of the deep sustainability folk have just prior to a period of great migration, or change. Certain species display agitation and restlessness — a phenomenon referred to by scientists as “zugunruhe,” which McLennan identifies with, shaped by this current zugunruhe pattern emerging among people yearning for a sustainable future.

“Zugunruhe is a work of creative genius that draws us into an engaging journey of self-discovery, brings the biggest and most frightening issues of our time up close, and invites our engagement,” notes David Korten, “It will leave you envisioning human possibilities you never previously imagined.”

Paul K. Haeder: Why aren’t communities taking charge of sustainability when it comes to cities’ decision?

Jason F. McLennan: “We’ve moved backward as a population on these issues of climate change and sustainability. A large percentage of Americans do not believe it’s real. Cities will have to make more substantial progress. We still have our eyes closed using these old sets of laws, regulations. In every community there are people working on making better, sustainable cities. The problem is the cities – planners, architects, engineers, politicians – can only push sustainability … as far as where society can accept it.”

PKH: Why are we stuck in this incremental change mindset, in planning, in development, in sustainability programs?

JFM: Changes will happen for reasons not in our control. But it’s best to put into place models of what we think success is. We need to continue speaking to the choir. We need as many people in our musical group able to play the sustainability part. Look at us as little conductors with little orchestras. We have to spend time focusing on those that do sustainability and teach them to play, and then pull them into deeper commitments to sustainability. We can’t leave people in a place of shame, hopelessness. We have to envision success and a positive end game. People aren’t wanting to hear about the impending catastrophe … about Kunstler’s ‘long emergency.’”

PKH: What’s your take on LEED-washing?

JFM: LEED can be a powerful tool for powerful change … most of the time. However, it doesn’t get used that way. People are trying to game the system. The larger question is why did that group use LEED? Do I think that LEED is perfect? Absolutely not. No system is perfect. And yes, some criticism is deserved – and needed – to keep improving what has become the most dominant green building program in the world. But there is a big difference in criticism that is intended to make the program stronger – so that it can continue to contribute to lowering environmental impact and changing the building culture – and criticism that is intended to tear down and destroy something that I believe has done a lot of good in the world.¹

PKH: Can planners do more to both encourage sustainability in their work and help designing cities under political constraints to take it on more vigorously?

JFM: It will take investment, large sums of money shifting into deep sustainability. The whole paradigm needs to change. It is going to take a lot of people who made money under the old paradigm — who have profited the most – to create the economic conditions for this new paradigm.

PKH: Sustainability lite or green washing. What do you have to say about those issues?

JFM: “We wish Vancouver was doing more. We feel hamstrung at times when we go in as consultants. How far can that mayor push? Not very far. Until there’s a groundswell from the communities. I will say that if we are serious about cutting greenhouse gas emissions, then we need a World War Two effort to retrofit America’s housing. We’d be cutting greenhouse emissions thirty to fifty percent in two years with the right investment – money – very little time, and significant behavioral change.”

Where Is the Planning Profession on Sustainability and Green Washing?

I spoke with John Robinson, Executive Director, UBC Sustainability Initiative; Professor, Institute of Resources, Environment and Sustainability and in the Department of Geography at the University of British Columbia. My biggest concern at the sustainability leadership school was the skirting of social justice and social sustainability throughout the week.

I asked him a question so many others ducked: How can we in this sustainability movement who want net zero waste and living buildings and other sustainability designs to be the way of the future start looking at sustainability on a much more holistic and socially just and deep ecological frame?

Robinson was clear: “This is a real issue, but again I am optimistic. I think the social leg of the sustainability stool is much less well developed, but I also think it is coming. In the academic realm, fields like political ecology put it front and centre; on the activist front, and it is getting increasing attention in NGOs like DSF and Pembina (look at the Transition Towns movement in the UK, for example). Business is a bit slower and government the slowest but I believe it is coming, especially at the local level.”

We also talked about green washing.

“As someone remarked in about 1995 ‘the growth industry of the 1990s is green bullshit.’ This is not a new problem,” Robinson says. “But what is sometimes overlooked is that this growth is accompanied by an equivalent or perhaps even faster growth in our ability to measure and monitor sustainability (metrics, indicators, monitoring systems, etc.) In the 1990s at the University of Waterloo, I asked an engineering class to tell me what was better from an environmental point of view: electric hand dryers or paper towels. They couldn’t answer the question because they couldn’t find lifecycle data on the materials involved. Today, you can easily find the relevant data on the web. So green washing is, over time, self-limiting, I think, as we get better and better at measuring and detecting it.”

We toured Robinson’s brainchild, the hallmark of sustainability on any campus, right smack on the UBC campus: The Centre for Interactive Research on Sustainability (CIRS). It is being billed as a net positive building, or at least Robinson and others want to see it that way. It will open in Summer 2011. One compelling feature are two by fours turned into ceilings – wood from Alberta’s millions of acres of pine beetle damaged timberland. It is mostly discolored, harvested before it becomes a net positive carbon releaser.

Contrasting views of the planning profession with James Howard Kunstler, John Robinson, Mark Holland (a Vancouver city planner who now manages the Sustainability Office) and Bill Rees (his four-decade career at UBC has been marked by a prolific output of writings, a resume of over 80 pages and the development of the ecological footprint concept, while helping to found numerous organizations such as the David Suzuki Foundation, the Canadian Society for Ecological Economics, and the International Society for Ecological Economics) is revealing.²

Kunstler:

I do not believe the planning profession as we know it will exist institutionally much longer. It rests on assumptions that to me are just not true – for instance, the idea that we can continue living within the current armatures of daily life, including the metroplex city and the suburbs. I believe our big cities will contract severely back to their old centers and waterfronts (if they are lucky enough to have them), and that the process will be very messy, with ethnic conflict, fights over ownership, massive capital losses, and infrastructure that we will be unable to maintain. Hence, I think the “action” will move to our smaller cities and towns, especially places with a meaningful relationship to agriculture. I see our economy becoming much more internally focused (within North America). Since trucking and commercial aviation are toast, the inland waterways will regain importance. It’s unclear whether we will have the capital or the will to reconstruct our regular rail system (forget about High Speed). These represent epochal shifts. Some parts of the USA (e.g. the Southwest, Florida) may become uninhabitable. This is a scenario that does not admit much of a role for conventional bureaucratic planners who sit in air-conditioned offices drawing charts based on reliable metrics.

Robinson:

I think we are the vanguard of the future and the route to real innovation and increased well being, for both the planet and ourselves. We’ll see who is right. The old sustainability agenda is about being less bad, about limits, and about sacrifice. The new sustainability agenda is about innovation, opportunity and improved well-being (the regenerative concept). I think that is an exciting and empowering concept that will catch on and become irresistible.

Holland:

We proceeded with planning according to a paradigm of modernism and no planetary limits during the massive build out of the 20th Century. The planning profession is getting its head around the new 21st Century reality of constraints and change quickly – but the cities we build and the regulations we have in place (mostly engineering regulations not connected to planners) change very slowly, especially in an atmosphere of recession, financial constraints and fear As we change and accept the global stewardship mandate of the 21st Century and change our rules development, our cities will slowly change. They’ll change a lot faster once the plateau of peak oil is over in a few years and the cost of the factors that have caused our 20th Century cities to become unsustainable become less tenable.

Ironically, the entire week of speakers, workshops, site visit and team building ended with one of the gurus of sustainability, as in the ecological footprint, William Rees. His words stirred the participants after a week of hard work, huge learning curves and spiritual bonding.

Rees: “De-growth is going to be the major issue of the century. While the energy crisis will have severe economic impacts, it is not fundamentally about economics. It is about human ecology and the limits of growth.” Rees is the author of Our Ecological Footprint. Rees is also affiliated with UBC’s School of Community and Regional Planning. There is a movement, De-Growth Vancouver, working with Rees and others on what this kind of city might look like.

Rees also is on the advisory board of the Carrying Capacity Network with such notables as Herman Daly (theorist of the steady-state economy) and Thomas Lovejoy (who introduced the concept of biological diversity). This larger push to tie immigration to climate change is part of a population control ploy — greenwashing nativism — which has been written about extensively, recently in a Nation magazine piece by Andrew Ross, a professor of social and cultural analysis at NYU, and author of Nice Work if You Can Get It.

The threat of global warming will increasingly be used to shape immigration policies around a vision of affluent nations or regions as heavily fortified resource islands. Is this mentality already at work? Internationally, the ugly side of the debate about emissions has centered on who has the right to go on polluting and which portions of the world’s population will be sacrificed. Even as cities in affluent countries compete with one another in the sustainability rankings, the same kinds of triage calculations are being made locally, and as resources tighten, the most vulnerable citizens and migrants are cut loose.

Sustain the Sustainable – Where Sustainability Is Going

Here is an interesting contrast in perspective by the leader in sustainability, Gro Harlem Brundtland’s words in the preface of “Our Common Future,” published in 1987, 1999, and then officially 20 years after its publication, 2007:

1987

Many critical survival issues are related to uneven development, poverty, and population growth. They all place unprecedented pressures on the planet’s lands, waters, forests, and other natural resources, not least in the developing countries. The downward spiral of poverty and environmental degradation is a waste of opportunities and of resources. In particular, it is a waste of human resources. These links between poverty, inequality, and environmental degradation formed a major theme in our analysis and recommendations. What is needed now is a new era of economic growth – growth that is forceful and at the same time socially and environmentally sustainable.³

1999

Well, first of all, we should maybe be reminded of the key definition that we formulated: that sustainable development amounts to meeting the demands of the present generations while preserving the rights of future generations to meet their own needs. I think that concept is important to be reminded of, because that illustrates the environmental dimension of sustainable development. In fact, if we misuse nature, and the relationship between man and nature, we will not be in a situation one generation from now, or two generations from now, for them who live then, to have choices and opportunities in life to have a healthy and prosperous future. So, that intergenerational picture and very clear link came forward in that report Our Common Future, and I think that was really what made the strongest impression on people, the other one, the clear links between poverty and environment, which also means between poverty and development. If people are poor, they don’t have choices. They are not empowered, often neither by knowledge, or by health, or by choices in their daily lives, to take care of the future of their children, and the next generations, because the immediate need dominates their lives and their choices. That also made an impression on many people. And the fact that this is not only a national question inside each nation, but also a global challenge, because of the big gaps, both inside countries and between countries. So, the global perspective of being in this together came very strongly forward in 1987 when the report was delivered. And those dimensions are as relevant today as they were in 1987.⁴

2007

We were very clear in 1987 that the responsibility for dealing with these problems building up in the atmosphere, that responsibility belongs to the industrialized world. We have to clean up our problems, and at the same time we have to help the developing world have new technologies to make it possible for them to jump over the polluting stages that we have been through.

We have no time to lose. The data are now clearly presented and have very high confidence levels. There is no question anymore about scientific disagreement. So many things are easily done and lead to improved energy efficiency and a number of other benefits.

Unless we start immediately fulfilling the Kyoto Protocol and then continuing with a broader basis with all countries involved, this is going to get completely out of control and we will not be able to cap carbon dioxide levels. It’s a drama playing itself out in front of us, where we are still able to change a very dangerous scenario but we cannot wait for another 5 or 10 years. We must be active now.⁵

1. Go to, “Defending LEED,” by McLennan.
2. For more on Bill Rees.
3. 1987 – Our Common Future, one small part of Chairwoman’s Foreword, Oslo, 20 March 1987.
4. Interview by Patricia Morales and Ann Ferrara, WHO Report Making a Difference,” 1999.
5. Andrew C. Revkin, “20 Years Later, Again Assigned to Fight Climate Change,” New York Times, May 8, 2007.

It’s July and we’re in a planned community in the heart of Vancouver: green roofs, solar powered trash compactors, LEED gold and platinum architecture. It’s also a Thursday afternoon and hardly anyone is outside. Even with a building occupancy rate of over 70 percent, there is no public activity. No one is around but us and the two 19-foot tall birds, perfectly scaled sentinels of a morphing city.

The visit is part of the University of British Columbia’s Summer Institute in Sustainability Leadership, a week-long course for professional planners in July. We are hoofing it around the grounds of the Vancouver Olympic Village, the largest LEED-certified platinum neighborhood in North America—also called the world’s greenest athletic facility. The group includes planners, environmental and sustainability directors, landscape architects, social planners, energy experts, a coffee services manager, a yoga clothing manager, a Unilever middle manager—most of them from Canada, several from Korea, one from Brazil, and, me, the lone Yankee.

The developers and the City of Vancouver are trying to sell Southeast False Creek, the site of the Olympic Village, to a build-out of 16,000 people, with 250 affordable housing units—and ecology is part of the marketing campaign.

But the sparrows so lovingly depicted by Vancouver artist Myfanwy MacLeod are also a testament to humanity’s constant threat to biodiversity. Eight pairs of sparrows were first released on this continent in the spring of 1851, in Brooklyn, New York. They are now one of the most common birds in North America, the world for that matter. MacLeod’s artwork—commissioned for the 2010 Olympics and Paralympics—speaks volumes about the state of the planet and the current marketing around sustainability.

One of my conclusions from the sustainability institute is that green is in, but greenwashing reigns. James Howard Kunstler, a friend and colleague—and the author of Geography of Nowhere—is working on a new book about the limits of technology. In no uncertain terms, he tells us that inventing and selling us new stuff won’t fix our environmental problems. “The ‘green’ campaign has largely become a money-grubbing project based on extremely unrealistic wishful thinking about technology, along with a sort of therapy campaign to make us feel better,” he says.

Taking the pulse

My role at the Institute’s summer course was to take the pulse of a province, city, and university known as the most advanced green places on earth. I went in looking for a chance to frame the concept called greenwashing—or sustainability lite, as Judy Layzer calls it. Layzer is an associate professor of environmental policy and the director of MIT’s urban sustainability project.

I quickly found that many of the leaders in sustainable city movements across Canada and the U.S. tend to duck the really tough questions any planner might ask: Don’t we have to “do” deep sustainability at the municipal and regional levels to truly affect change? How does the planning profession promote greenwashing? If the poor have no safety nets and the middle class is struggling, what is the point of LEED platinum certified communities?

Many sustainability action plans call for superficial fixes. “Local policies such as plastic bag bans, restricting lawn watering, and tree-planting must be evaluated to judge their actual outcomes in terms of reducing greenhouse gas emissions and improving the quality of city life,” says Anthony Flint, director of public affairs at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Flint was more than open in explaining in email exchanges what we have to do to get sustainability implemented and greenwashing quashed:

“In my chapter in This Land (2006), I looked at the then-nascent green building movement, where municipal officials and others were contemplating requiring green standards as part of urban development agreements, essentially as part of codes,” Flint told me.

“The early examples got some of the basic stuff out of the way — encouraging the use of stairs, using natural light and ventilation, efficient lighting, bike lockers, stormwater treatment and water management, landscaping beyond lawns that need to be watered, composting/recycling ( both operational and in the construction process), the now ubiquitous green roof. Now just about every developer and architect is green, as a standard. It’s no longer news to have a LEED certified building, but rather an expectation.”

Flint, like others, sees the “greenest part” of any building as its location – “a redevelopment of an urban site, access to transit, walkability context.” So, a great LEED-gold building in a suburban office park that has to be accessed by car is not green by any stretch of the imagination.

Many cities are on that bandwagon: Tearing down old buildings and putting up new- fangled green dreams—the silver, gold, platinum, and beyond platinum goals of the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design architecture administrated through the U.S. Green Building Council.

But are green points the answer to global warming?

“All rating systems are flawed and completely depend on the assumptions and inputs used to get the output. And once you have them, what do they really tell us?” asks Mike Lydon, a principal for the Street Plans Collaborative, a consulting firm that helps clients improve the viability of active transportation and smart growth. Lydon is also co-author of The Smart Growth Manual (2009), with Andres Duany and Jeff Speck.

“Take LEED, for example,” Lydon continues. “The new urbanists and other likeminded people helped awaken the world to the fact that a LEED platinum building is really not as great an accomplishment as a fully walkable, transit-served neighborhood. So, while we can rate buildings, it’s critically important to look holistically at their context and how people access them.”

How do these buildings perform? Joseph Lstiburek in the Journal of the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers calls to task the architects and engineers who go after the brass ring embedded in those LEED points. He calls these “green motives” that have little to do with long-term energy savings. Some of these designs use more energy than they save.

A much larger question grows out of this sustainability and greenwashing discourse.

What is a sustainable city exactly?

“Cities are at their core consumptive networks,” says Todd Reisz, an Amsterdam-based architect and co-editor of the recently published Al manakh 2: Gulf Continued, which looks at the Persian Gulf region, from both historical and contemporary perspectives.

“They consume the most energy, not only in terms of fuels but also in terms of food and natural and manufactured materials.”

Suddenly cities seem cleaner, Reisz tells me, but that’s not exactly true. Both the U.S. and Canada have sent (or lost) their carbon-heavy industries to other nations. “Manufacturing and other unappealing uses have been moved elsewhere, either to an industrial park beyond the public’s eye or to another continent altogether.” But does the ranking of the “greenest” communities, he asks, “include the CO2 emissions required to manufacture that city’s computers in China, the energy required to grow its bananas in Costa Rica?”

Many planners and analysts look for guidance from architect and designer Steve Mouzon, who has defined what real sustainability means in the built and natural environments. Among his major points for the average citizen to live by, separate from what a city planner or architect has to do for sustainability, are laid out by Lloyd Alter, architect, developer, inventor, and builder of prefab housing. He writes for TreeHugger and is an Associate Professor at Ryerson University teaching sustainable design.

• Choose it for longer than you’ll use it
• Live where you can walk to the grocery
• Live where you can make a living
• Choose smaller stuff with double duty

But in his book The Original Green—a must read—Mouzon also coins the term “gizmo green.” We can’t rely on technological solutions to our global warming crisis. Instead, Mouzon says, we should stop relying on a few experts like architects, planners and engineers and designers.

“Think about this for a moment: if millions of the best minds around the world work for years to figure out the mysteries of true sustainability, how ridiculous would it be to expect each significant architect to reformulate sustainability in the image of their own personal style? Asking a single person to reformulate years of work by millions of the best minds goes beyond the absurd… to the globally treasonous! We must be allowed to share wisdom.”

For people like Anthony Flint, he weighs the practical with the philosophical when it comes to sustainability. Flint’s a journalist and author: Wrestling with Moses: How Jane Jacobs Took on New York’s Master Builder and Transformed the American City (2009) and This Land: The Battle over Sprawl and the Future of America (2006).

“So one divide is between what Steve Mouzon and others refer to as ‘gizmo green’ and urban development — with the emphasis on urban — that is almost by definition green. Skanska’s [USA division of Swedish giant, Skanska AB] retrofit of the Empire State Building is a good example of combining the two — the location green by definition, and cutting-edge construction processes and green technologies that result in the long-term energy savings that building owners covet.”

In the end, as the Vancouver Olympic Village architects and Mouzon and others tell us, the places that are sustainable have to build community involvement and love for place.

Lydon agrees. “We need to make places worth caring deeply about, and that requires far more than aggregating net zero building, bullet trains, or bike lanes,” he says. “Indeed, a million net zero homes that require their inhabitants to drive 30 miles a day probably aren’t as ecological as a million homes that aren’t net zero, but which are in places that don’t require driving.”

So, how can we in the sustainability movement start looking at sustainability in a much more holistic way?

“This is a good question and a challenge,” says Moura Quayle, former chair of Vancouver’s Urban Landscape Task Force, which gave birth to the city’s Neighborhood Greenways program, a true community-based sustainability tool utilizing small-scale, local connections for pedestrians and cyclists, linking parks, natural areas, historic sites, amenities and commercial streets. As the City of Vancouver’s web site explains:

“Neighbourhood Greenways provide opportunities to express the unique character of the neighbourhood and often include public art which adds further interest and distinctiveness to the project.”

Again, these projects in the Greenways Program are initiated by residents and are partnered with the City. The community is expected to take the lead and maintain the space, while the City of Vancouver assists with the design, development and construction of the project.

“We are facing it in Vancouver as we talk [about being the] ‘greenest city’ and mean much more than environmental sustainability.” For Vancouver, Quayle insists, place identity also fits into the concept of “green.”

“Place identity as a third component of community sentiment opens the discussion to a host of related disciplines, such as humanist geography and environmental psychology. These disciplines seek to investigate the meaning of place to human experience. Place identity consists of cognitions about the physical world, including memories, ideas, feelings, attitudes, values, preferences, meanings, and conceptions of behavior and experience which relate to the variety and complexity of physical settings that define the day-to-day existence of every human being.”

There are planners who see sustainability as a market-driven solution to community challenges tied to climate change, peak oil and heavy urbanization of our globe’s cities.

Mark Holland, a Vancouver city planner who now manages the Sustainability Office, has little tolerance for environmentalism and social justice driving sustainability.

“Sustainability was co-opted by the environmentalist and social justice movements and was quickly branded in the minds of those not personally identified with those movements as just another leftist radical stance.,” he says. “Sustainability is simply the only context which our economy can function in this century, and it needs to be loudly rebranded as that.”

What’s next?

How will we cope when the world has nine billion people (about 30 years from now)? Different visions for how we might operate were set forth in the report, “Our Common Future,” known more commonly as the Brundtland Report, published in 1987. The report—a gargantuan multi-government and multi-disciplinary effort—recognized holism and systems thinking as forces to solve a universal problem.

All sectors of society, according to the report, must be active participants and decision makers in a world moving into crisis mode. But it is only now that cities, counties, and states might be attempting collectively and strategically to come together after more than 24 years since that much quoted definition of sustainable development was penned by former Norwegian Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland: “…development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”

A bioregional framework that represents a “whole scale nature-human linked system as a place-based approach to promote scientific understanding, planning, and action to regenerate our communities and other living systems” still is way beyond the average politician and citizen operational model.

However, it’s becoming clearer to planners and politicians alike that places like the Cascade Bioregion or the Napa Valley Bioregion, for example, each call for unique investigative practices that will bring forth planning, design, and management skills that will make the bioregion resilient through these unique sets of landscape-human patterns.

Despite a general acceptance that sustainable development calls for a convergence between the three rails of economic development, social equity, and environmental protection, the concept remains elusive. For many like Kunstler and Mouzon, the grip of technological, political, and other constraints creates a fertile ground for the greenwasher to thrive.
When I am with fellow educators, sustainability planners, and professionals looking for ways to be change agents in sustainability, I understand the learning curve is steep for those who have not immersed themselves in climate change, sustainability, and social justice and grassroots movements.

At the Sustainability Leadership class, it is clear that many of the facilitators did not want to tackle the big E in the triple bottom line: equity. In fact, there is dissonance with these leaders when I challenge their assertions that Wal-Mart is the model for sustainability.

Many in sustainability circles want solar, LEED, wind turbines, some metering for energy use and carbon emissions, but they do not question the “corportacracy” that many in the deep sustainability movement in U.S. and other countries are challenging.

We’ll use Wal-Mart as an example of a company trying to use sustainability as a tool for the corporation’s profit drive. Many times I’ve heard folk cite this new book, Force of Nature: The Unlikely Story of Wal-Mart’s Green Revolution (2011) by Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Edward Humes.

The problem with Wal-Mart is endemic of a large predatory corporation that is attempting to corner the world’s retail market, whose CEO (Lee Scott) made $24 million last year in pay and another $8 million in stock options, and whose corporate policy is to give money to GOP and Blue Dog democrats as part of a lobbying effort.

Using solar panels made in China and selling organic produce from Chile do not make a sustainable company when one figures the wage gap issue –

According to the April 2011 “Living Wage Policies and Big-Box Retail” report by Center for Labor Research and Education at UC Berkeley, the retailer could easily pay associates $12 per hour. Even if Wal- Mart passed the total cost to customers, 46 cents per WalMart visit would be added to one’s tab.

Then there’s the issue of Wal-Mart’s “Love, Earth” line of jewelry, that, according to Wal-Mart meets environmental criteria and meets social criteria. The idea that these criteria are meaningful is refuted by the Broward-Palm Beach New Times article that examined “Love, Earth” from the mine to the store.

Think $50 a month paid to Bolivian miners for this line of Wal-Mart stuff. Or the cyanide heap-leaching process of mining the silver and gold.

Maybe the local city planner won’t be hosting a film night using Robert Greenwald’s Wal-Mart: High Cost of Low Price or the film, Store Wars: When Wal-Mart Comes to Town as a jumping off point, I’ve hosted a few in Spokane as a graduate planning student at Eastern Washington University. A few off the record voiced what Al Norman of Sprawl-Busters had to say about Store Wars:

Store Wars takes you inside the grassroots politics of Ashland, Virginia, and inside a campaign by Wal-Mart to overpower the town. It is not pretty, but it lays out why Wal-Mart has become the most reviled corporation in America today.

Planners seem to be caught somewhere in the middle of theory and practice, and pitted against politics and economics. So where does planning fit in?

“Planning’s greatest strength is its greatest weakness: It knows change does not come quickly,” says Reitz. “It also assumes there will be a continuously corrective process. And when a planner says it cannot be done quickly, he is let go. This is a broad generalization, but it happens.” Change can come neighborhood by neighborhood and still be effective, he adds. “I don’t see anything wrong in that.”

Michael Harcourt — former mayor of Vancouver and then, later, premier of British Columbia who is now a speaker and author of the book, A Measure of Defiance, and co-author of two books, Plan B: one Man’s Journey from Tragedy to Triumph and City Making in Paradise — sees sustainability as a spectrum. “I don’t use terms like greenwashing. I prefer to look on sustainability policies and practices as a continuum from easy to do, to very hard to accomplish without major structural, attitudinal, political changes.”

Also thinking along those lines is Moura Quayle, Deputy Minister of BC’s Ministry of Advanced Education as well as UBC Sauder School of Business professor. She helped save some valuable farmland on the UBC campus for what is now the ideal showcase for sustainability: the UBC Farm, where land, food, and community learning reign at the 24 hectare farm.

“My field has shifted from being focused on the built environment to a focus on leadership and transformation of the way people think. And I am quite pragmatic,” she says. “For example, I’ve tried to figure out (in the past) how to be practical about how communities can build their own environments—for social and environmental benefits.”

Another example of a seemingly fundamental shift: Will Chicago’s move to plant southern swamp oaks and sweet gum trees be considered deep sustainability or green panic? With permanent heat waves forecast in 50 to 100 years—and thermal imaging already showing the hottest spots—the city is ripping up pavement and putting in green roofs. Is putting in AC for all 750 public schools greenwashing, green scare, or impractical?

Chicago’s deputy commissioner of Department of Environment, Aaron Dumbaugh, has told the US Press many times that “cities adapt or they go away” to justify the Windy City’s green dream: to be the greenest city on the planet.

Steve Mouzon from Miami thinks about sustainability at the community level. It’s about “building sustainable places, so that it then makes sense to build sustainable buildings within them,” he says. “Sustainable places should be nourishable, accessible, serviceable, and securable. Sustainable buildings should be lovable, durable, flexible, and frugal.”

“Today, most discussions on sustainability focus on gizmo green, which is the proposition that we can achieve sustainability simply by using better equipment and better materials,” Mouzon says. “We do need better equipment and better materials, but this is only a small part of the whole equation. Focusing on gizmo green misses the big picture entirely.”

Designing with nature (think, Ian McHard, 1969, Design with Nature) might also be a salient point here, as ornithologists and amateurs alike know the common sparrow is in great decline in Europe. Maybe Canadian artist Myfanwy MacLeod gets greenwashing best through her artwork: “Locating this artwork in an urban plaza not only highlights what has become the ‘natural’ environment of the sparrow, it also reinforces the ‘small’ problem of introducing a foreign species and the subsequent havoc wreaked upon our ecosystems.”

Green Cities and Green Washing Sources
http://www.chicagoclimateaction.org/
http://ourgreencities.co
http://www.siemens.com/entry/cc/en/greencityindex.htm
http://www.originalgreen.org/OG/Home.html
http://vancouver.ca/greenestcity/
http://rmc.sierraclub.org/energy/library/sustainablecities.pdf
http://coolcitiesde.us/about.html
http://www.monocle.com/specials/35_cities/
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/08/11/the_global_cities_index_2010
http://ourblocks.net/neighborhood-based-community-building-handbooks-recommended-by-jim-diers/
http://home.comcast.net/~jimdiers/
http://www.naturalstep.org/
http://www.naturalstepusa.org/
http://www.citiesforpeople.net/cities/curitiba.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hRD3l3rlMpo&feature=related
http://sustainablecitiescollective.com/mothincarnate/24900/how-greenwashing-really-can-make-difference
http://www.greenwashingindex.com/index.php
http://www.smartplanet.com/blog/smart-takes/greenwashings-toll-americans-get-green-fatigue/13392
http://www.pewclimate.org/
http://www.greenerchoices.org/eco-labels/eco-home.cfm
http://blog.terrachoice.com/2010/03/18/what-does-all-natural-really-mean/
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=greenwashing-green-energy-hoffman
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=greenwashing-environmental-marketing

Sometimes, a movie “review” is a catharsis, or just both barrels aimed at the aimless prognostication of filmmakers co-opted by the growth paradigm and enamored by the so-called “creative class.”

I’ll tackle both hernia-inducing topics in several more stories to come, but first some observations while going to and leaving the film, Urbanized.

Irony: Going to see the film Urbanized, at the Northwest Film Forum in Seattle and witnessing in just a few miles of driving from Beacon Hill during the Snow-ageddon of 2012  tow trucks lifting hybrid autos onto flatbeds; Seattle PD patrol vehicles slipping and sliding; a few ice falls by pedestrians; the dull roar of Interstate 5 muted significantly because Seattle shuts down after three-quarters of an inch of snow.

Reality: City life, with pho venders literally raking the sidewalks with garden tools, kids using sled discs to get airtime on unplowed streets normally clogged with Amazon.com employees, and lots of people out and about taking snapshots of their snow-covered automobiles (only three inches of the white stuff!) in this rare winter wonderland.

Observation: Cool, hip Capitol Hill, with all the trendy coats, boots and Dr. Zeuss hats on a growing legion of lifestylism experts who yak it up about their love of Obama, how that civet defecated coffee is “so decadent” at $600 a pound, and how Thomas Friedman is really a smart guy. The only thing missing this night at the movies? The lower half of the 99 percent huddling in drafty apartments trying to keep down the obscene Puget Sound Electric bills; the homeless guys with pretty pun-filled “will wash your SUV for a fee” cardboard signs pissing off metro-sexual guys on their way to pedicures; the feral cats and dogs looking for out-of-date sushi dumped out back. Even the rats were smart enough to hunker down.

As a journalist who’s seen Tucson, Phoenix, El Paso, New Mexico and much of Southern California turn into  metastasized suburban sprawl nightmares;  someone who’s tried to crack the code of  less than creative bureaucratic, careerist city planners and engineers as a beat reporter; and a planning practitioner who ended up with a graduate degree in urban and regional planning emphasizing sustainability –  going to an 80-minute film about our urban world ( more than 50 percent of global population is living in cities as of 2011) is going to be wrought with skepticism.

The 2011 Gary Hustwit film, titled Urbanized,  has a few strengths and many gaps, not so much attributed to which cities were featured and not highlighted, but hobbled by how the filmmaker sheds light on the urban reality of city planners, architects, the Mayor Bloombergs or Dalys of the world, and all those developers and their sycophants in the Chamber of Commerce who are beholding to Wall Street and “the” banks.

That collective build-pave-raze elan is under-girdered in an undying faith in unsustainable growth (economic and population) paradigms in Hustwit’s  documentary. The confidence in the minds and motives of the vaunted few making decisions for several billion citizens’ well beings (or our increasingly impoverished lives) not just pertaining to the here and now or the immediate future, but seven generations out, is grotesque.

The film could have been oh so much more at this bizarre time of the vanguard still blathering on about incrementalism when it comes to planning cities around the inevitable – peak oil, food shortages, Diasporas, climate instability and resource hoarding.

It’s difficult for me to sit still in a film like Urbanized, or when viewing the PBS series, e² , what was touted as “a critically acclaimed, multipart PBS series about the innovators and pioneers who envision a better quality of life on earth: socially, culturally, economically and ecologically.”

It’s because I started out as a 16-year-old (1973) in Tucson working against the rampant scouring of the Sonora desert, all the way into the magnificent Santa Catalina Mountains, where I hiked alongside black bear, puma, mule deer, dozens of reptile and avian species in what has to be the most diverse and abundant desert in the world. We’re talking about canyons and season springs and caves and immense verdant miles and miles of ocotillo and palos verdes.

I began seeing the light when informed, well-spoken community groups hit stonewall after stonewall going to politicians and land use departments demanding an end to the bulldozing and fracturing of vital, abundant ecosystems (Center for Biological Diversity started in Tucson).

I’ve been on tasks forces looking at sustainability, peak oil, food security and climate change up in the Pacific Northwest.  I’ve had some killer guests on my radio show which ran on a community radio FM radio station, the last and largest population-wise license approved by “There is Yellow Cake” Colin Powell’s son the old FCC chairman, Michael Powell.

Folk like Richard Heinberg (Peak Everything) and Post-Carbon Institute’s David Lerch talked about sustainability and sustainability-lite. James Howard Kunstler (Geography of Nowhere and The Long Emergency) and Bill McKibben (The End of Nature) talked about the political realities of a one-party America never forcing the issue of true economic and urban development. David Suzuki (renowned Canadian author, environmentalist, and documentarian) and Tim Flannery (The Weather Makers) talked about how far away the average Westerner was to understanding the truly monumental problems cities will face because of climate change.

I’m seeing more and more limited sight and broken thinking tied to so-called renewable energy and climate change and sustainability initiatives by corporations and municipalities. But documentary-makers?

How can people with film-making credentials and the backing miss so much in a film? Those were the underlying questions I had throughout the 80 minutes of Urbanized. I could not stop thinking about what all the greenwashing cities and proponents of smart growth have done over the past thirty years, skewing even more the conversation about cities’ survival.

Hell, I was wondering where the dystopia of The Road could fit into Urbanized.

All these emotions flooded me in my frustration while watching the film, especially since I had just spent a week in Vancouver, Canada, attending what is called The UBC Summer Institute on Sustainability Leadership. It was there where I ran into the same kind of thinking – technology and the hyper-developers and architects will get us all out of climate change’s way.  That’s another essay in DV, soon to come.

The stuff I’d been working on tied to this idea of “the new black is green” that eco-pornographers and the corporate-modeled environmental groups like the Sierra Club are shilling I couldn’t shake while sitting through the film.

The film Urbanized is really looking at cities from the One percent/Twenty-nine percent perspective (I’ve come to come up with the Thirty Percenters as the dividing line in my frame for this Occupy movement). The fact is so much could have been learned by Urbanized’s director from the great trilogy by Austrian filmmaker Michael Glawogger.

Glawogger looked at the the underclass in Mexico City, Bombay, Moscow and New York in Megacities (1998); and then manual labor at the beginning of  this century through the blood, sweat and tears of coal miners in the Ukraine, ship dismantlers in Pakistan, slaughterers in a Nigerian stockyard and sulfur harvesters on an Indonesian mountain in Working Man’s Death  (2005); and then in Glawogger’s  latest feature, Whores’ Glory, he explored the streets of New York, Mumbai, Moscow, and Mexico City — the “megacities” in his three-punch uppercut to view the new realities of the 21st Century.

We’re turning into urban dwellers, human rats, farther and farther away from farming and what could have been intentional communities far and wide, sustainable, compact, supported by agrarian ingenuity and smaller and smaller human footprints with dynamic, active cultural structures.

Instead, we are in a rush to get wired-in, carting our families and belongings into the centers of employment, and some of the outfall is more anxiety  about being out in rural-scapes. The Thirty Percent has facilitated this uneven takeover of our lives. Small towns are drying up all over North America, and what were small towns near cities have turned into gated communities and suburban ghettos about to be annexed into bigger and bigger concentrations of people moving endlessly in cars to cobble together a living working two or three part-time jobs.

This is the 70 percent I consider the real defining group that the Occupy movement alludes to by invoking the 99 Percent jingo.

As an out of work planner in  Seattle – a city not very dynamic when it comes to outside the box thinking in terms of “urban and regional planning” – I understand one back story: throughout the 1970s and 1980s many city planning offices were gutted and the smart practitioners and innovators ended up in private development. So, it’s not so surprising to see how  developers have been setting the agenda for city planning,  especially in smaller towns or Sun Belt cities.

The film Urbanized is a broad brush stroke canvas expression of the design and development of urban centers, touching briefly on the hot button issues Seattlites know so very well – transportation, crime, public spaces, city planning, architecture, energy consumption. Hustwit adds to that the bastard child created from the union of  “free trade,” unbridled capitalism,  consumer-driven development, and corporatocracy – slums, both inner-city  and on the outskirts of the world’s most highly populated and growing cities.

Here’s the missing debate in films like Urbanized: while a total of 227 million people rose out of slum conditions from 2000 to 2010, thanks largely to policies in China and India, according to the UN Human Settlements Programme, also called UN-Habitat, slums are the biggest “impediment” for urban developers.

For some, this is a rare success in the UN’s Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). As such, MDG 7, Target 11, UN members pledged to “achieve significant improvement” in the lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers by 2020.

These incremental steps, or the one step forward, two steps back, looks pretty tough on the poorest of city dwellers:  from 2000-2010, the absolute numbers of slum dwellers increased from 776.7 million to 827.6 million.

“Cities are growing faster than the slum improvement rate,” said Gora Mboup, a Senegalese who co-authored the report, State of the World Cities 2010/11: Bridging the Urban Divide, issued two years ago.

Half of the increase of 55 million extra slum dwellers came from population growth in existing slum homes; a quarter by rural flight to the cities; and a quarter by people living on the edge of cities whose homes became engulfed by urban expansion. It’s this urban ballooning that both creates slums and threatens those slum dwellers who at least in some cases have patched-together roofs over their heads in these communities that end up taking hold, like the parachuting seeds of dandelions.

Along the US-Mexico border, they are called colonias.

UN-Habitat warned in March 2010:

Short of drastic action, the world slum population will probably grow by six million each year, or another 61 million people, to hit a total of 889 million by 2020.

We’ve been talking about these basic urban topics for decades in the planning and community development fields:

• in 40 years – 2050 – 75 percent of the world’s population will live in cities;
• infrastructure and city services in most cities were designed for people who were middle income or higher;
• cities have been prioritized for private space and automobiles;
• there is a movement toward greater citizen involvement – participatory planning;
• resiliency is key in order for civilization to shift into new living arrangements precipitated by resource shortages, climate change and pollution;
• progressive action and plans have to be contained in not only the planner’s toolbox, but in the politician’s and CEO’s as well; and,
• cities account for 75 percent of energy used/burned and 75 percent of global greenhouse gasses.

For a general audience, Urbanized might be news or compelling, though too much in the documentary comes from the mouths of architects, engineers, politicians and planners, and not enough from community groups and citizen participants in their cities’ designs.

Gary Hustwit understands the limitations of working on a film dealing with the “morphology of cities” with so much of the back story left out:

There are so many cities we couldn’t go to that are not in the film. Our approach with ‘Urbanized’ was not to look at specific cities. It was to look at specific, universal issues and then look at specific projects around the world. Universal issues that face all cities: We all need a roof over our head, we need clean water and sanitation, we need mobility and ways to get around, we need some place to work and we need places to relax. Whatever you want to talk about in a city, it all pretty much boils down to one of those five issues. Then we look at how different cities are dealing with them. In a way, we are making a composite city. I couldn’t think of any other way to structure it.

The film doesn’t look at the price of depopulating rural villages and towns. The concept of permaculture and permanent cultures tied to agrarian work, marketing and food processing is never touched upon. What about the price of urbanization around the absolutely astounding farmer suicide rate in India –  where a quarter of a million farmers have committed suicide in the last 16 years? Think of one farmer committing suicide every 30 minutes. Why? City life, city thinking.

Agriculture in India is subject to global markets in this push for  economic liberalization. Emphasis has been placed on building and retrofitting cities in India, so removal of agricultural subsidies and the opening of Indian agriculture to the global market have increased costs – through bigger and bigger farmer loans — while also reducing yields and profits for many farmers. Some of that is tied to seed and biotech fascism around such companies as Monsanto, or the heavy price pumping water from historically significant aquifers for bottling companies like Nestle and CocaCola?

In the film, we do see Paris, New York, the slums of Mumbai, the beaches of Rio de Janeiro, the bike lanes of Bogotá, Colombia, lighted walkways in Apartheid-cleaved townships on the outskirts of Cape Town, a new housing project in Santiago, Chile, the depopulating Detroit (once 1.4 million folk, down to 386,000) and the shame of New Orleans almost seven years after a category three hurricane hit..

It’s no criticism of the film that it was finished before the public power of the Arab Spring and Occupy Movement, but Hustwit in a recent interview ramified the impact of public participation in public spheres:

Attitudes about what the priorities of a city should be and whom city space should benefit are changing. And it had to come as a result of people literally taking the space back. All the public-private plazas in New York City are a perfect example of space being sold off to the highest bidder, when really the city should step in and preserve more of this space for public use.

It’s clear that Seattle should have tackled the issues Jim Diers brought to the fore as Seattle’s  first director of Department of Neighborhoods in 1988 and serving under three mayors for 14 years. His book, Neighborhood Power: Building Community the Seattle Way, is about community participation and organizing, Sal Alinsky-style. His book and philosophy has been scrutinized by other cities, including Austin, Texas.

Alas, community now is about defined locations of gentrification, gated communities, and the poor and lower middle class in the suburbs, making huge emotional, economic and sustainability sacrifices at the hands of sub-living wages, two or three jobs and a closed loop of driving from the hinterlands – those suburban ghettos – to places in the metropolitan areas for work.

Movies about the welfare of culture, mankind, our organizing tools to stave off war, injustice, environmental calamity and die off should be long, provocative and from the heart. Urbanized seems 20 years behind the times in many ways, sort of a peek into the minds of rarefied designers, architects and planners.

Those planners and designers and wonks are living in a Richard Florida fantasy land of this creative class of high tech gurus and support engineers who supposedly make cities work, and make them interesting, artistic, bohemian, and where all the “cool, hip, liberal Obama-supporting types” create the great cities of the present and future.

This is not a film that posits much from Jane Jacobs thinking, either from her work in 1961, Death and Life of Great American Cities or Dark Age Ahead (2004).

In this latter book, her main focus is on “the five pillars of our culture that we depend on to stand firm.” Those pillars can be applied to most Westernized or non-Western societies — the nuclear family (but also community); education; science; representational government and taxes; and corporate and professional accountability. While Dark Age Ahead is pessimistic in a good way, her conclusion is more buoyant than all of her critique up to that point:

At a given time it is hard to tell whether forces of cultural life or death are in the ascendancy. Is suburban sprawl, with its murders of communities and wastes of land, time, and energy, a sign of decay? Or is rising interest in means of overcoming sprawl a sign of vigor and adaptability in North American culture? Arguably, either could turn out to be true.

We live in a time when on one hand a mayor like Chicago’s Rahm Emanuel may speak the new urbanism language of developers, architects, and strategic planners, but he is Occupy Chicago’s worst enemy, using mass arrests, suspension of the valued one phone call in prison and distaste for nurses and teachers to “plan his city.”

Emanuel is like many mayors in the US, tied to the machinations of developers, financiers, and  private planners: lots of talk about enterprise zones/urban cores, carbon footprints, sustainable jobs, green infrastructure, and smart growth, but also, as Emanuel is proposing, criminalizing the act of expressing dissent, minimizing the time and place where people can protest, giving police more authority to suppress protesters, and adding extensive rules and restrictions that bureaucratize the process of obtaining a permit and severely limits the “fluidity” of demonstrations.

Urbanized barely scratches the surface, and no matter how “cool” or technologically awe-inspiring some aspects of  mega cities of the world seem, a few billion people are protesting the toil, pollution, lack of wages, and unbelievably inhumane treatment galvanized by this  creative class Gary Hustwit highlights in his film who seem to think they have the final say in the plans for our world’s cities’ futures.

Hell, most places in the US are so broken more and more college graduates are lining up at food banks, a 100 million feral dogs and cats roaming the streets just might be subject to police shoot-to-kill policies as animal control units are gutted (see Harrisburg, Pennsylvania’s plan for stray dogs), and grand schemes like a $4.2 billion deep bore tunnel to replace the Alaskan Way Viaduct in Seattle get approved to placate the waterfront-lusting developers.

The irony behind Urbanized’s implicit ending, as illustrated in an October 2011 interview of Hustwit in the journal  Design Observer, is a  case study in  his next documentary, a subject caught in the shadow in the towering skyscrapers of our urbanized world – rural life.

When I went to interview Rem Koolhaas [world-renowned Dutch Architect] — and it took months and months for us to get him scheduled — we finally sat down, and we talked a little before the interview started. And I said we are going to talk about cities. And the first thing Rem says is: You know I’m not really thinking about cities anymore. Now that 51 percent of people live in cities, what I’m really interested in is all these spaces that we are leaving behind in the countryside.

This maybe a fun projection of the next movie to come for Hustwit, but the absurdity of our times are underway when it comes to the ultimate city, as Will Doig of Salon.com writes in a piece, “Science Fiction No More: The Perfect City is Under Construction”:

And so it will be with cities like PlanIT Valley, currently being built from scratch in northern Portugal. Slated for completion in 2015, PlanIT Valley won’t be a mere “smart city” — it will be a sentient city, with 100 million sensors embedded throughout, running on the same technology that’s in the Formula One cars, each sensor sending a stream of data through the city’s trademarked Urban Operating System (UOS), which will run the city with minimal human intervention.

We saw an opportunity … to go create something that was starting with a blank sheet,” said PlanIT Valley creator Steve Lewis, “thinking from a systems-wide process in the same way we would think about computing technologies.

Oh no, that’s a whole other essay-article I’ve got to get my arms around and pen, and soon. The entire creative class and knowledge worker saving the world mentality of our time, at least in many of the megacities and smaller ones like Seattle or San Francisco, ties into this PlanIT Valley hyper-homeland security, nanny-sitting, dead-creativity world of the blasé.

This is the very thinking that Jacobs decried and James Howard Kunstler dissects. Is this really the world’s attitude toward modern technology and city-building and city-living, as Mark Shepard, an architect and the author of Sentient City: Ubiquitous Computing, Architecture, and the Future of Urban Space, states?

“From a tech perspective, we’re not really selling products and services anymore. We’re selling lifestyles,” he says.

See Urbanized  after you rent the movie, The Age of Stupid. After you watch, The End of Suburbia. It’s easy to end a movie review about planning with a thousand quotes, but I’ll put two down from creative folks, real ones, and not planners:

Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.

— Edward Abbey, writer, essayist, novelist (1927-1989)

A common mistake people make when trying to design something foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.

— Douglas Adams, author, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy (1952-2001)

It can be argued that the concessions to the extractive MNC and local ‘leading’ classes assures stability, steady revenues and finances the incremental social expenditures which permit the re-election of the center-left regimes. In other words a de facto alliance between the “top” and “bottom” of the class structure is the unstated bases for center-left electoral successes despite the growing political divergence between the regimes and sections of the social movements.

The Progressive Camp

There is a general consensus that regimes in seven countries in Latin America form what can be called the “progressive camp”: Bolivia, Ecuador, Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Peru and Venezuela.

The identifying features usually attributable to regimes in these countries include: (1) their past political trajectory: most are led by former leaders and activists from social movements, trade unions or guerrilla formations; (2) their relatively independent foreign policy pronouncements especially regarding US intervention and sanctions policies; (3) their ideological rhetoric rejecting US-led regional bodies and favoring Latin American centered organizations; (4) their populist electoral campaign programs regarding social equity, environmentalism, and human rights; (5) their vehement rejection of ‘neo-liberalism’ and traditional neo-liberal personalities, parties and privatizations; (6) their strategic perspective that envisions a prolonged process of social transformation that emphasizes an agenda featuring modernization, developementalist priorities, and high levels of investment oriented toward global markets; (7) their prolonged political incumbency based on constitutional reforms permitting re-election justified by the need for completing the transformative vision.

The progressive camp has a self-image, projected inward to its electorate as representing a rupture or ‘historical’ break with the past, first with regard to the traditional neo-liberal oligarchy and secondly with the ‘statist’ left. In the case of Bolivia, Ecuador, and Venezuela they frequently resort to rhetoric evoking “21st century socialism”. The potency of the appeal to radical novelty has a limited time span dependent on the degree to which the regimes pursue policies in variance with the preceding neo-liberal regime.

The ‘Left-Right Division’ as Represented by the Progressive Camp (PC)

The perceptions of the objective and subjective divergence between the progressive camp and the right vary according to whether they emanate from official sources or from a critical empirical investigation.

According to the ideologues of the “Progressive Camp” (PC) there are at least five major policy areas which reflect the radical rupture with the traditional neo-liberal right.

(1) Nationalism: (a) the PC through renegotiations of contracts with extractive MNC secures a higher rate of taxation, increasing revenues for the national treasury; (b) via increased state investment it converts wholly owned private firms into public-private joint ventures; (c) through increases in royalty payments it lessens ‘foreign exploitation’; (d) through the greater presence of ‘local technocrats’ it increases national oversight of strategic economic decisions.
(2) Foreign Policy: The progressive camp has pursued an independent, if not explicitly anti-imperialist foreign policy. The progressive camp has established several Latin American and Caribbean regional organizations which deliberately exclude the presence of North American and European imperial countries such as ALBA (Bolivarian Alliance of the Americas) and UNASUR (Union of South American Nations). The PC has rejected sanctions against Cuba, Iran, Syria, and Gaza and opposed the US-backed NATO war against Libya. They criticized the US position at the Summit of the America’s meeting in April 2012 on at least three major issues – inclusion of Cuba, opposition to British colonial control of the Malvinas, and the de-penalization of drugs. The PC has expressed its opposition to US hegemony, to IMF “structural reforms” and Euro-US control over international lending institutions. With the exception of Venezuela, the PC has diversified its export markets. For example Brazil exports to the US only 12.5% of its goods and services, Argentina 6.9%, and Bolivia 8.2%.
(3) Social Policy: The PC has increased social expenditures, especially toward reducing rural poverty; increased the minimum wage; approved salary and wage increases. In a few countries they provide easy credit and financing to small and medium businesses, have given legal title to land squatters and distributed plots of uncultivated public lands as a kind of ‘agrarian reform’.
(4) Regulation: The PC has, with varying degree of consistency, imposed controls over the financial sector, regulating the flow of speculative capital and the volatility of financial markets. With regard to the extractive sector regulations have been relaxed to permit the large-scale inflow of capital and the pervasive use of toxic chemicals and genetically modified seeds by agro-business. They have permitted the expansion of mining, agriculture, and the timber industry into Indigenous people’s and natural reservations. They have financed large-scale infrastructure projects linking extractive enterprises to export outlets trespassing onto previously regulated, protected natural habitats. Regulatory norms have been harnessed to facilitate ‘productive’ extractive developmentalism and to limit the financialization of the economy.
(5) Labor Policy: has been based on a ‘corporatist model’ of business-state-trade union (tri partite) negotiations and conciliation to limit lockouts and strikes and maintain growth, exports and revenue flows. Labor policy has been conditioned by the policy of limiting budget deficits, fixing wage increases, to the rate of inflation. In line with orthodox fiscal policies, pensions for public sector workers have been frozen or reduced especially among the middle and high end functionaries. Traditional job security guarantees have been maintained not augmented and severance pay has not been raised. Strikes by public sector workers, especially among teachers, medical staff and social service workers have been frequent and have led to government mediation and marginal gains. Government policy has been oriented toward protecting managerial prerogatives, while respecting and upholding the legal status, collective bargaining rights of trade unions. Within nationalized firms, state-appointed directors rule; there is no move toward worker self-management or ‘co-management’-except in limited cases in Venezuela. The structure of labor relations follows the private corporate hierarchical model Labor has, at best, an advisory role regarding health and safety but no determining influences or investment within this corporate framework. Pressure via strikes and protest by trade unions have been necessary, frequently in alliance with community groups, to rectify the most egregious corporate violations of health and safety rules. While the progressive regimes publically eschew neo-liberal “labor flexibility” policies they have done little to expand and deepen labor prerogatives over the labor and productive process.

The principle difference in labor policy between the progressive regimes and the traditional right is the ‘open door’ to labor leaders, their willingness to mediate and grant incremental wage increases, especially of the minimum wage and generally, the reduction of harsh, violent repression.

Continuities and Similarities between Past Neoliberal and Contemporary Progressive Regimes

Writers, academics, and journalists on the Right and Center-left emphasize the difference between the progressive and the past neo-liberal regimes, overlooking the large-scale socio-economic and political structural continuities. A more nuanced, balanced, and objective analysis requires that these continuities be taken into account because they play a major role in discussing the limitations and emerging conflicts and crises facing the progressive regimes. Moreover, these limitations, based on the continuities, highlight the importance of alternative development models proposed by popular social movements.

The agro-mineral export model has demonstrated profound strategic deficiencies in its very structure and performance. The promotion of agro-mineral exports has been accompanied by the large-scale, long-term entrance of foreign capital which in turn determines the rates of investment, the sources for inputs of machinery, technology and ‘know-how’, as well as control over the marketing and processing of raw materials. The MNC “partners” of the progressive regimes have conditioned their involvement on the bases of (a) the de-regulation of environmental controls; (b) the termination of price controls and the introduction of “international prices” for sales to the domestic market; (c) freedom to control foreign exchange earnings and to remit profits overseas.

They also control decisions regarding the exploitation of mineral reserves. Expansion of production is dependent on their own global criteria rather on the needs of the ‘host’ country. As a result, despite the “re-negotiated” contracts, which the progressive regimes hail as a “giant advance” toward “nationalization”, the cumulative losses in revenues and in rebalancing the economy are substantial. If one looks beyond the agro-mineral enclave the negative impact to further development are substantial. The very limited impact that the agro-mineral model has on the economy as whole has led to occasional conflicts between the MNC and the progressive host governments. A case in point is the conflict between the nominally Spanish oil company Repsol and the Argentine government of Cristina Fernandez in April 2012. Repsol’s behavior illustrates all the pitfalls of collaboration with foreign overseas extractive corporations. Repsol refused to increase investments, claiming that local regulated prices reduced profit margins. As a result Argentina’s energy bill rose three-fold between 2010 and 2011 from $3 billion to $9 billion. Furthermore, Repsol repatriated its profits, paid high dividends to overseas stockholders and thus had little impact in creating domestic industries producing inputs or refineries to process petroleum. The attempt by the deceased President Kirchner to increase ‘national ownership’ by bringing in a local private capitalist, (the Peterson Group) had no positive impact, merely entrenching Repsol’s control. When Fernandez took majority shares in order establish public control and increase local production, the entire Eurozone leadership led by the Spanish government and the Western financial press launched a virulent campaign, threatened litigation and predicted economic disaster. The problem of ‘inviting’ foreign MNCs to invest is that it is hard to disinvite them. Once they enter a country no matter how unfavorable their performance, it is difficult to rectify or undo the damage and move onto a new public centered model of development.

All the progressive regimes with the possible exception of Venezuela have signed long-term large-scale contracts with major foreign extractive multi-nationals. Apart from the increase in royalties these agreements do not differ greatly from contracts signed by preceding right-wing neo-liberal regimes.

Evo Morales signed a large-scale exploitation contract with Jindal, an Indian multi-national to exploit the iron-mine Mutun with virtually all inputs — machinery, transport, etc. — imported and with very limited ‘industrializing’ of the raw iron ore, mostly simple iron ‘nuggets’. The bulk of Bolivia’s gas and oil is exploited by foreign MNC-public ‘joint ventures’ and is shipped abroad, leaving most of the 60% rural households without piped gas,and resulting in Bolivia’s importing most of its diesel.

Ecuador under President Correa, another leading progressive president, signed two big contracts with foreign oil groups in February 2012, despite the opposition of the majority of Indian organizations including CONAI. In Ecuador, as in Bolivia, big oil and gas companies, while raising objections to the re-negotiations of contracts leading to an increase in royalty payments and an increased presence of public officials, retain a privileged position in crucial decisions regarding management, marketing, technology and investment. Despite claims to the contrary, the leaders of the progressive regimes sign off on these strategic agreements without consulting the communities affected. Decisions are based exclusively on executive privilege. The style and substance of the distribution of the powers and privileges in the oil and gas agreements between the progressive governments and the multi-nationals are no different than what transpired under previous ‘neo-liberal’ regimes. Moreover, in both Ecuador and Bolivia many of the “technocrats” and administrators who worked under the previous neoliberal regimes play a prominent role in running the joint venture.

While progressive regimes have pursued anti-poverty programs and have registered some successes in reducing poverty levels, they do so as a result of the growth of the economy not via the redistribution of wealth. In fact, the progressive regimes have not pursued redistributive polices: income and land concentrations, including high levels of inequality remain intact. In fact the hierarchy of the class structure has not been altered and in most cases has been reinforced by the inclusion of new entrants into the upper and middle class. These include many former leaders and activists from the lower middle and working class who have entered the government as well as ‘new capitalists’ benefiting from state contract agreements with the progressive regime.

The financial system has remained intact and prospered under the progressive regimes, especially because of the regimes tight fiscal policies, build-up foreign reserves, control over government spending and low rates of inflation. Financial sector profits are especially high in Brazil, Uruguay, Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador. Brazil, in particular, has attracted large inflows of speculative capital from Wall Streets and the City of London because of its high interest rates relative to the rates in North America and Europe.

Alongside the concentration of ownership in the extractive and financial sector, the progressive regimes have not introduced progressive taxes to reduce the disparities of wealth. The income of the agro-business elites in Bolivia, Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, and Ecuador are several hundred times that of the bulk of subsistence farmers, peasants and rural laborers. Many of latter remain subject to brutal working and living conditions. In many cases, the progressive regimes have done little to enforce the labor and health codes in the giant agro-business plantations while workers are subject to unregulated toxic chemical sprays.

If the configuration of ownership and wealth remains relatively unchanged from the neo-liberal past, the progressive governments have accentuated the tendencies toward export specialization. Under the progressive governments the economies have become less diversified and more dependent on agro-mineral and energy exports, and more dependent on large-scale long-term foreign investments for growth. State revenue and growth are more dependent on primary product exports.

The free market policies of the progressive agro-mineral export regimes have stimulated the growth of large-scale commercial activity. The commercial sector is increasingly influenced by the large-scale entrance of foreign owned multi-nationals, like Wal-Mart, who source their products overseas, undermining local-small scale producers and retailers.

The appreciation of the currency has adversely affected traditional manufacturers and the transport industry causing significant job losses especially in textiles, footwear and automobiles in Brazil, Bolivia, Peru and Ecuador. Moreover, favorable polices promoting large-scale agro-mineral exporters has been accompanied by a credit squeeze on local small business people, especially, producers for local markets who have been bit hard by the import of cheap consumer goods (from Asia). Farmers producing food for local markets have been downgraded in the drive to expand cultivation of export crops like soya.

In summary, the progressive regimes have pursued a multi-faceted double discourse: an anti-imperialist, nationalist and populist rhetoric for domestic consumption while putting into practice a policy of fomenting and expanding the role of foreign extractive capital in joint ventures with the state and a rising new national bourgeoisie. The progressive regimes articulate a narrative of socialism and participatory democracy but in practice pursue policies linking development with the concentration and centralization of capital and executive power.

The progressive regimes preach a doctrine of social justice and equity and a practice of co-optation of social leaders and clientalism via poverty programs for the poorest sectors of society.

The progressive regimes have combined incremented income policies with large-scale structural changes, benefiting the extractive-primary sector. Stability of the PC is utterly dependent on the increasing demand for raw materials, high commodity prices, and open markets. The progressive regimes have successfully linked trade union and sectors of the peasant movement to the state and have undermined or weakened independent class organizations and replaced them with corporate tri-partite structures.

The progressives have successfully ‘reformed’ or replaced the chaotic, de-regulated, conflictual, racialist policies of their predecessors and institutionalized “normal capitalism.” They have introduced rules and procedures favorable to institutional stability, fiscal discipline, and incremental but unequal gains. In other words, the “parameters of neo-liberalism” are now effectively administered and legitimated by faux nationalism based on greater political autonomy and market diversification. Centralized executive decision making based on agreements which require extractive MNC to invest and develop the forces of production is legitimated by an electoral framework and a multi-class political coalition.

The domestic and foreign policies of the progressive extractive regimes reflect two contradictory experiences: their radical origins in the lead-up to taking power and their subsequent adoption of an agro-mineral developementalist export strategy, favored by neo-liberal technocrats. The “synthesis” of these two apparently “contradictory” experiences finds expression in the adoption of an independent, critical political position toward imperialist militarism and interventionism and economic collaboration with the agencies of economic imperialism, namely the signing of long-term and large-scale contracts with US-EU-Canadian agro-mining and energy multi-nationals. In other words, the progressive extractive regimes have ‘redefined’ or reduced imperialism to mean its state structures and policies rather than its economic components (MNC) which are engaged in the extraction of raw materials and exploitation of labor. In the same fashion, they redefine ‘anti-imperialism’ to mean opposition to political-military interventions and a ‘fair distribution’ of profits between the regime and its MNC “partner”. This redefinition allows the progressive regimes to claim popular legitimacy on the bases of periodical criticisms of the policies and practices of the imperial state while collaboration and agreements with the MNC allow the progressive regimes to retain support from domestic and overseas business interests. When a progressive regime, as is the case of Argentina ruled by Cristina Fernandez, decides to “nationalize” or more correctly secure the majority shares in Repsol, the nominally Spanish oil multi-national, the entire financial press, the European Union, and Washington denounce the move and threaten reprisals. In other words, the unstated pact between the progressive camp and the imperial regimes is that political differences are tolerable but nationalist economic measures are not acceptable. Renegotiations of contracts to increase state revenues may cause a temporary suspension of new investments but not a political confrontation. However, the public takeover of a foreign extractive firm evokes predictable hostility and retaliation from the imperial states. The Argentine progressive regime’s embrace of a policy of economic nationalism was, however, enterprise and sector specific. The Fernandez regime did not, and has no future plans, to expropriate other extractive firms, nor was the measure part of a general nationalist strategy to shift toward greater public ownership. Rather Repsol’s refusal to increase investments and production was increasing Argentina’s dependence on imported oil, which was deteriorating its balance of payments and foreign currency reserves. Repsol’s refusal to comply with Argentina’s developementalist agenda was based on the Fernandez policy of maintaining the retail price of oil for the domestic market below the international price. Repsol’s decline in production was a way of leveraging the regime to lift price controls. However, a higher petrol price would have a negative impact on industrial and private consumers, raising costs and reducing the competitiveness of the Argentine exporters and domestic producers. In effect, Repsol’s intransigence threatened to undermine the social and political balance of forces between labor and capital and between extractive exporters and popular consumers, which sustained the regimes majoritarian coalition. In brief, the measure was nationalist in form but capitalist developementalist in content.

Even so the measure polarized the global economy between the imperial west and the Latin American left, with the usual imperial satraps in Latin America (Mexico’s Calderon and Colombia’s Santos) backing Repsol.

Divisions between the Progressive Regimes and the Social Movements

Prior to coming to power via electoral processes, the progressive leaders maintained close ties and actively supported and participated in the ‘street action’ and mass struggle of the social movements. They embraced the banners of economic nationalism, ecological conservation and respect for the natural reserves of the Indigenous communities, social equality, and reconsideration of the foreign debt including the repudiation of ‘illegal debts’.

The social movements played a major role in politicizing and mobilizing the working and peasant classes to elect the progressive presidents. This convergence was short-lived. Once in power, the progressive regime appointed orthodox economic ministers to run the economy. They adopted the extractive strategy, shifted from a nationalist public sector economy, designed to diversify the economy, to a ‘mixed economy’ based on joint ventures with overseas extractive capital. First, the Indigenous communities of Peru, Ecuador, and some sectors in Bolivia went into opposition, on the bases that their interests were neglected and they were not consulted. Second, sectors of the working class and public employees struck demanding higher salaries, an increase in public spending. Small farmers and manufacturers demanded economic stimulus for family farms and local industry rather than subsidies for agro-mineral MNC, fiscal orthodoxy, and export strategies based on lower labor costs and neglect of the domestic market.

Radical trade union peasant and Indigenous leaders of the social movements called into question the entire agro-mineral extractive strategy, the distribution and administration of state revenues and expenditures. They reasserted their support for a social program embracing agrarian reform, including the expropriation of large plantations and the redistribution of land to landless peasants. Workers’ leaders called for an industrial policy to process ‘raw materials’ in order to create manufacturing jobs. Some trade unionists called for the nationalization of strategic industries and banks. However, despite some major protests, the bulk of the followers of the social movements and the majority of their leaders soon shifted from radical rejection of the extractive model to demands for a bigger share of the revenues. The progressive regimes attracted the bulk of the social leaders to tri-partite councils of conciliation to negotiate and secure incremental changes. The progressive regimes highlighted their opposition to “neo-liberalism.” They redefined it as unregulated capitalism based on low royalties and underfunding of social programs. The progressive regimes successfully divided the social movements between “utopian” radical opponents and progressive reformists. In time of social strife, the progressive regimes evoked a “left-right alliance,” charging their social critics of acting on behalf of imperialism, impervious to their own collaboration with imperial based multi-nationals. Presidential appeals, a nationalist populist discourse, and increased revenues which funded increased social expenditures weakened the left opposition. Moderate but sustained increases in anti-poverty programs and minimum wages neutralized the appeal of the radical leaders in the social movements. Despite the progressive regime’s break with its ‘radical egalitarian roots,’ it was more than able to secure large-scale mass-electoral support, based on the overall dynamic growth of the economy and steady growth of income. Both were underpinned by long-term high commodity prices.

Popular extractivist presidents repeatedly won elections by substantial majorities and were able to mobilize sectors of the moderate social movements to counter anti-extractivist social movements. The high prices of commodities and multiple opportunities for exploitation of resources attracted foreign investors despite higher royalty payments. Foreign investors were attracted by the social stability ensured by the progressive regimes in contrast to the instability of the previous neo-liberal regimes. The progressive regimes thrived on economic ties with the MNC and an electoral alliance with the lower classes.

Case Studies of Extractive Capitalism and the Progressive Camp

While the seven regimes which form the ‘progressive camp’ share a common development strategy based on the export of primary commodities there are significant differences in the levels of diversity of their economies, the nature and character of the commodities which they export, the degrees of social polarization and social cohesion and the size and scope of the opposition. In line with these differences there are also substantial differences in the degree to which the “progressive and extractive model” is sustainable or subject to upheaval or reversal.

The progressive camp can be divided in many ways: between those regimes based on charismatic leaders and extreme dependence on primary exports (Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador and Venezuela) and those with developed industrial sectors and ‘institutionalized political leadership (Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay). There are also significant differences in the degree of class and ethnic conflict: Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador are experiencing significant mass resistance from substantial Indigenous communities, while in Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay, where the Indigenous population is sparse, there is only isolated opposition. In terms of class struggles, Bolivia, has experienced widespread protests by health, education, mining, and factory workers. Venezuela has faced lockouts and boycotts organized by the economic elite (“class struggle from above”). Ecuador faced widespread protests from the police. Most of the rest of the countries (Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay) faced limited strikes largely on wage issues. With the exception of Bolivia, the major trade union confederations work closely and collaborate with the progressive regimes; in contrast, the peasant and rural workers movements in Brazil, Ecuador, and Peru have retained a greater degree of independence and militancy largely because they have been the most prejudiced by the agro-mineral export strategies. In Venezuela and Brazil, landlord’s private armies have played a major role in combatting land reform beneficiaries with relative impunity.

The most pervasive and environmental degradation has occurred in Brazil, where millions of acres of rainforest have been “cleared” during the decade of Workers Party rule. Chemical exploitation of agriculture is strong in most countries especially in Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay where soya production has become a dominant crop. All the major agro-industrial exporters (Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay) rely on toxic chemicals and GM seeds with numerous cases of toxic consequences for indigenous residents and their natural habitat. The issue of toxicity and environmental degradation resulting from the giant mining and timber companies has been well documented in Peru, Ecuador, and Uruguay. Overall, the greater the urban population and the more dispersed the rural communities adversely, affected, the smaller the environmental protest and the likelihood that NGO ecologists play a leading role in protest.

Since the extractive industries are outside of the major urban centers, since most of the major trade union confederations collaborate with the progressive regimes and secure incremental wage increases, and since the overall economy has been growing and unemployment has declined, macro-economic imbalances, commodity dependency and related structural vulnerabilities have not resulted in major confrontations between labor and capital. The most contentious conflicts which have occurred have been between the orthodox neoliberal elites backed by US and European powers and the progressive regimes. Several cases come to mind.

On April 12, 2002 and in December 2002-February 2003 the Venezuelan capitalist class backed by the US and Spain organized an abortive coup which was reversed and a petrol industry lockout that was defeated. An uprising in 2011 led by the police in Ecuador and an abortive coup in Bolivia were put down successfully, before they gained traction. A large-scale agro business protest in Argentina in 2008 which paralyzed the agro-export sector against an export tax ended with regime concessions.

In large part, these “class struggles from above” worked in favor of the progressive regimes because it allowed them to pose the issue as one between a popular democratic regime and a retrograde authoritarian oligarchy. As a result the progressive regimes were able to neutralize, at least temporarily, internal critics from the left. The defeat of “the Right” burnished the credentials of the progressive camp and raised their popularity.

While popular support was important in sustaining the progressive regimes against US and EU backed rightest destabilization campaigns, of equal or greater importance was the backing of the military, sectors of the business elite and extractive capitalists. The progressives by adopting “moderate policies” – including business subsidies and generous pay hikes to the military – were able to divide the elite, retain support of the military and isolate the right-wing opposition. The right-wing has remained electorally marginal and provide very limited leverage for US-EU interference and influence over the progressive agenda.

The degree of “progressiveness” within the progressive extractive capitalist camp varies substantially.

The Chavez government has advanced an anti-imperialist and socialist agenda involving the rejection of US coups, wars and blockade of independent states; it has supported the re-renationalization of oil, aluminum, and other raw material, mining, and energy sources. Its extensive agrarian reform benefiting 300,000 families is aimed at food self-sufficiency. Universal free public health and higher education and subsidized basic food prices via publicly owned supermarkets; and large-scale low-cost public housing for the poor along with literacy campaigns and the formation of thousands of neighborhood councils to adjudicate and resolve local issues have deepened and extended the socialization process

On a far lesser scale, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Argentina have pursued independent foreign policies. Their partial and selective nationalizations are designed to increase revenues rather than as part of a long-term, large-scale strategy of transformation. They have not followed Chavez’s lead on agrarian reform and on greater enhancement of social spending on health, housing, and higher education. They offer remote, public lands of dubious quality as “land reform.” They have been advocates of incremental changes involving wage and social benefits commensurate with the rise in revenues from commodity exports and in line with the rate of inflation, Bolivia and Ecuador have dislodged land squatters and defended the major agro-business land holdings. The least ‘reformist’ regimes with the most dubious ‘progressive’ credentials are Brazil, Uruguay, and Peru (under Ollanta Humala) which have adopted a free-market agenda; they actively promote large inflows of unregulated foreign investments, degrade millions of acres of the rain forests (Brazil especially), promote agro-business and oppose agrarian reform in all of its forms, relying on the dispersion of peasants and landless to the cities, towns where they serve as a labor reserve for capital or join the low paying informal sector. These “moderate” progressive regimes have signed military accords with the US, and adopt a low profile in opposition to US imperial policies in the Middle East. Their “progressiveness” is found in their support of regional integration, their opposition to US hemispheric hegemonism (opposing the US coup in Honduras, blockade of Cuba and interference in Venezuela), and the diversification of overseas markets. Brazil leads the way in catering to Wall Street speculators and in government anti-poverty spending on minimum food baskets. Poverty reduction is matched by the spectacular growth of millionaires linked to the finance and agro-mineral export sector. The “moderate” progressives have the most egregious (and well-documented) record of ongoing environmental degradation. In Peru, Humala has given the green light to mining exploitation threatening the livelihood of thousands of peasants and local business in Cajamarca; Presidents Lula da Silva and Dilma Rouseff, of the Workers Party, promoted the destruction of millions of acres of the Amazon rain forest and displacement of scores of Indian communities in a decade. In Uruguay, the Broad Front Presidents Tabaré Vasquez and Mujica promoted the highly polluting Botina cellulose factory contaminating the Parana River despite mass protests.

In summary, it is difficult to generalize about the performance of the progressive camp given the divergences in social and economic policies. But a “report card” of sorts can be drawn up.

All regimes have lowered poverty levels and increased dependence on agro-mineral exports and investments. All have signed and/or renegotiated contracts with extractive MNC’ few have diversified their economies. Those with a substantial industrial base (Argentina, Brazil, Peru) have suffered a severe decline in the manufacturing sector because of appreciating currencies and loss of competitiveness resulting from high prices for commodity exports. Incremental wage agreements have led to low level social conflicts in the cities (except in Bolivia), but displacement of peasants and degradation have intensified conflicts in the interior between rural communities and the MNC leading to state repression (Peru).

The social impact of the progressive regimes has the widest variation, with Venezuela registering the most far-reaching structural changes and the rest lacking any vision or project for redistributing wealth, income, or land. Their common support for regional integration is matched by important divergences in accommodation to US military policy. Venezuela, Ecuador, and Bolivia, the members of ALBA, reject military treaties, while Brazil, Uruguay, and Peru have signed military agreements with the Pentagon.

The overall economic performance is mixed. Brazil’s economy, especially its manufacturing sector, is stagnating with zero or negative growth in 2011-2012, Venezuela is recovering, but with over a 20% rate of inflation while the rest of the PC is experiencing steady growth, but increasing dependence on commodity exports to the Asian (China) market.

Alternatives to the status quo extractive economies vary enormously. In Venezuela, the regime has made diversification a high priority; the Brazilian and Argentine regimes are taking protectionist measures to promote industry with limited success especially as their policies are countermanded by the real expansion of acreage for soya production and exports. Uruguay, Peru, Ecuador, and Bolivia talk of diversification but have avoided taking measures to shift to food production and family farming and have yet to take concrete measures to stimulate local industry via a publicly funded industrialization policy.

It’s a prime piece of property in downtown Seattle, West Lake. The non-profit got the 12 acres for a song – $53 million after the land was appraised at $72 million.

Then the city of Seattle “gave” another $28 off the price, so this land ended up costing Bill and Melinda Gates – their foundation – $25 million.

More than 40 people, as part of a global day of action against Monsanto, recently marched to and around the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation “campus” in West Lake to deliver a letter asking the Foundation to divest from Monsanto (the Foundation has more than $23 million in Monsanto stock as part of a very odd mix of companies in their portfolio).

Trying to eradicate developing countries’ diseases, forcing genetically modified farming into Africa, and weighing in on and lobbying for privatizing public education are just a few of the Gates Foundation’s larger goals, largely financed by $11.9 billion, with the following five top stock holdings:

• Berkshire Hathaway Inc. – 73,997,400 shares, 49.75% of the total portfolio.
• McDonald’s Corp. – 9,372,500 shares, 5.21% of the total portfolio.
• Caterpillar Inc. – 9,590,400 shares, 4.86% of the total portfolio.
• The CocaCola Company – 10,182,000 shares, 4.31% of the total portfolio.
• Waste Management Inc. – 15,716,367 shares, 4.15% of the total portfolio.

They’ve got 500,000 shares of Goldman Sachs, 7.1 million shares of Exxon Mobile and those half a million shares of Monsanto.

Monsanto’s Chemical War on the World

What’s all the protesting about? According to Dena Hoff, a diversified family farmer in Glendive, Montana, and North American coordinator of La Via Campesina, “The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Trust’s purchase of Monsanto shares indicates that the Gates Foundation’s interest in promoting the company’s seed is less about philanthropy than about profit-making. The Foundation is helping to open new markets for Monsanto, which is already the largest seed company in the world.”

These aren’t sour grapes about one of the richest people on earth capitalizing on stock trading. Monsanto, who created the dioxin-leeching defoliant Agents Orange and Blue, is one of the main drivers of genetically modified foods.

Heather English Day, director of Seattle-based Community Alliance for Global Justice, and one of the organizers in Seattle to bring attention to the slash and burn mentality of Monsanto, the Gates Foundation’s AGRA, sums up the recent news on GE crops and foods: “Reports are coming out weekly about impending crop failures of GE corn in Africa, pesticide resistance for GE corn grown for ethanol in the US, and about indications that Bt toxins, the primary GE pesticides, especially when in the presence with Roundup, have potential impacts on human kidney cells and mammalian testis.”

Another protestor-letter signatory is Les Berensen, a medical doctor who is also with GMO Free Washington. His concern is tied to Monsanto’s Roundup, which has the main ingredient of 2,4-Dichlorophenoxyacetic acid. Berensen mentions how salmon and other fish species are being affected by the huge runoffs from fields of corn, beets, soy, cotton, and potatoes that are genetically modified to take up to four or five dousings of Roundup.

He likens this day and age of Monsanto as a Frankenstein era for both species in the wild and the human species. These anti-Monsanto events are carried out regularly in many parts of the world, and they are attended by a diverse group of people. In Seattle recently, several speakers rallied us before we marched to the FOundation: Dan Trocolli, Seattle Educators Association and Social Equality Educators; Kristen Beifus, Washington Fair Trade Coalition; and William Aal, Washington Biotechnology Action Council.

One fellow holding a corn sign and getting signatures is Travis Young, UW graduate student in planning and with CAGJ and AGRA Watch. He is seeing more and more destruction of departments at UW through consolidation and outright disbanding. He’s working on food policies for several cities as part of his graduate work.

Localized Food Security, Global Food Fights

“There are already many movements around healthy local food economies. There are proven projects and farms in Africa that are both sustainable and organic. Getting people hooked on Monsanto’s seeds and pesticides with micro-loaning that they can’t pay back will result in more farms being lost and more people moving to the cities. This is not a successful formula, and the Gates Foundation should really lead by getting rid of its Monsanto stocks, as a first step.”

Many protesters wear Haz-mat suits, and many carry signs belying the fear of this giant genetically modified experiment taking place in mankind. I met Ellie Rose at one of these events; she’s working on Transition Seattle and buttressing “a culture of engagement through a group called We the People Power.”

Karen Studders came from Occupy Wall Street, Zuccotti Park, where for two months she lived in a tent. Studders, in her mid-sixties, once worked in big business, for government organizations, and with United Nations agencies, plying her legal and science degrees from the University of Minnesota. “We have to act quickly. The abuse of these corporations, which is so blatant now, has got to stop. I have a lot of hope after being part of the Occupy movement, especially after we were illegally evicted.”

She not only went from tent to tent to listen to the ideas and rebellion of the youth, but she went into a self-made retreat after the police crack down, traveling to various cities to see the Transition Town movement up close and personal.

The security at the Foundation does not accept any signed letters. We tried delivering one asking the Gates Foundation to divest from Monsanto. I talked with several Foundation employees – researchers with higher education graduate degrees and doctorates. They said that Foundation’s policy for employees is to “not let us engage in any dialogue on any issues of controversy.” Which means, nothing but the weather can be discussed? (Whoops, climate change seems to affect disease and crops). Additionally, any nice, well-crafted and footnoted handouts on Monsanto and Roundup pesticides they might be handed “will have to be handed over to security once we enter the building.”

Those three monkeys – see, hear, and speak no evil – seem anachronistic in the 21st century for a think tank outfit like the Gates Foundation. Fortunately, less than a week after Seattle’s event, dozens of protesters monkey-wrenched Monsanto’s California office in Davis, an area close to the Capitol, through vocal activism. Unlike Seattle’s event, the California activists made demands to shut down the biotech giant which has its talons in the United States government, including the Supreme Court.

“If a small group can take down their office for a day from some mild protests, a few hundred thousand can take down the entire company — permanently,” wrote journalist Anthony Gucciardi from Natural Society.

Frankenstein’s Agronomists and Etymologists

Pretty strange news these days on the Franken-crop front, also known as the genetically engineered/ genetically modified food battlefield.

A top-secret visit by Bill and Melinda Gates to Australia in December to check up on their $10 million test crop of genetically modified bananas “capable of resisting disease.” Field trials at South Johnstone, Queensland, Australia, are pointing to a GE banana with more pro-vitamin A than regular bananas.

The stuff of movies like Soylent Green or some 21st Century James Bond plot. Poor African nations are in the sights of big agri-business and biotechnology outfits like Monsanto, Bayer, Chimera, BASF, Syngenta. The Gates Foundation’s AGRA – Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa – is all about top down mandates, hyper-technology, corporate-driven solutions, and sometimes bizarre genetically modified organism in a hocus pocus that puts profits ahead of precautionary principle.

Seven Billion Guinea Pigs and counting …

Full steam ahead for outside-the-local-region solutions, and damn the local knowledge, those land races of food and crop varieties that have stood the test of time — and culture.

George Siemon, CEO of Organic Valley, the nation’s largest organic farming cooperative, which had more than $600 million in sales last year, puts it plainly: “There is a growing awareness that our [food supply] system makes us all guinea pigs of sorts.”

Story after story, incident after incident prove to more than just the organic foodies that genetic engineering isn’t the answer to famine, climate change and strengthening food security for poor and rich countries. The seed company Pioneer (owned by Dow Chemical) was developing a GE corn strain, Herculex, that had wrapped up in its DNA a toxin that would help it resist corn rootworm. The problem was, as a group of scientists working at Pioneer’s request found out, that GE corn killed ladybugs.

Here’s where the GE-Biotech story gets ugly – according to the journal Nature Biotechnology, Dow prohibited the scientists from publicizing the research and kept it from the EPA. That corn bio-tech “creation” was approved in 2003.

Now the narrative really gets close to the HG Wells story of The Island of Dr. Moreau: Nature News reported that a research team discovered two varieties of transgenic canola in the wild, plus a third variety that is a cross of the two GM breeds. One of the transgenic varieties found was Monsanto’s Roundup Ready canola, – engineered to be resistant to glyphosate. The other one, from Bayer Crop Science’s Liberty Link canola, is resistant to gluphosinate.

That third cross contaminated variety contained transgenes from each of these, and, through it’s own evolutionary track, is resistant to both types of herbicide.

It doesn’t take graduate degrees in agronomy, chemistry and botany to figure out that companies like Monsanto and Syngenta have set loose into nature unnatural and untested plants that proliferate, cross-breed, and create new plants.

We have no idea what these GMOs are doing to us as biological entities eating so many foods containing GE canola, soy, corn and beet sugar used in a so many processed food products consumed by tens of millions of people.

Climate Change and Seeds

For more than two decades, and especially this past year, the alarms have been going off concerning climate change making an already difficult situation of global food security, and in Africa in particular, worse.

The climate change conference in Durban, South Africa, had all sorts of panels on food insecurity complicated by the effects of climate change. Which countries have the least capacity to adapt? Developing countries – i.e. the majority of countries.

The fourth assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – that body disregarded by Republicans and lambasted and vilified by the Tea Party and blokes like presidential aspirant, Ron Paul – recently made it clear with a convergence of dozens of scientific studies and organizations that there will be deleterious impacts of climate change on agriculture, livestock and fishing.

The Last Fish

Here’s how screwed up the GE-GMO purveyors are – genetically altered salmon, pen raised, of course, have been DNA-bombarded with the genes of a fresh water bass species so they get five times the size of “normal” farmed salmon in the same 18-month period. Feeding those Franken-salmon corn meal, soy by-products and chicken and beef renderings adds to the gross experiment.

Here’s an even more strange fact that is pushing GE technology into husbandry and fisheries sciences – a single bluefin tuna will make international headlines when it sells for more than $100,000 at Tokyo’s Tsukiji market. They are so rare now – overfished to near extinction – we have to marvel at the rapidity of the globe’s drive for wild food. Fish are probably the last wild food Americans eat. Sushi joints from Seattle to Missoula and Las Vegas are as popular as Carl’s Jr.

When I talk with sushi-eating friends about their habits, they shrug it off, saying they might as well eat the last of the wild marine protein before the world contaminated everything and shifts to GE-Everything.

Famine, Hunger, Solutions

Floods and inconsistent weather patterns affecting rainfall have impacted most parts of the world, situations worsened by the prices of fuel. Oxfam correlates this impact into hardship –climate change will help double food prices by the year 2030.

These factors, seen before and after Durban’s “Climate Conference Debacle,” are churning up the debate on genetically modified food. The Gates, Monsanto and some agricultural experts are convinced that GMOs will provide part of the answer to the long-standing hunger and food insecurity challenges that have plagued the African continent for half a century.

But civil society, social justice advocates and others from non-governmental organizations urged world leaders to focus on the importance of food security, particularly in Africa. Wilfred Miga of PELUM sees food in Africa tied directly to individual countries’ identity and sovereignty – food culture and the right to grow they’re called. PELUM is an association in Zambia giving political and technical voice to small-scale farmers in rural areas. It’s simple for people like Miga – improving livelihoods and increasing the sustainability of farming communities by empowering ecological best practices.

Miga said PELUM understands that despite the challenges the African continent faces, GMOs are not a universal answer to food insecurity. In fact, he like thousands of others in the food sovereignty movement know GMOs gut food sovereignty because those crops are patented, they are bio-manipulated to have killer or assassin genes that prevent germination without the pesticides and other artificial inputs created and marketed by the same seed companies or subsidiaries, and the crops in mass plantings will contaminate all other wild or non-GMO crops, in a worse case scenario.

Hawaii had widespread contamination of papaya crops from GM varieties, even in the seed stocks that were sold as conventional.
Jimmy Buffet and the Mosquitoes that Ate Key West

Worse yet, back to HG Wells, is the GE mosquito, in Jimmy Buffet land (maybe he’ll score a song about the Franken-squito and Margarita-ville).

UK-based Oxitec is going to release genetically-engineered mosquitoes in the Florida Keys this month, the first-ever U.S. release of these engineered bugs.

Aedes aegypti are produced by this private biotechnology company in hopes that their offspring will die at a young age in an effort to lower mosquito populations and limit the spread of dengue fever. Genetically-engineered mosquitoes were released by Oxitec in the Cayman Islands, Malaysia and Brazil. Eradicating dengue fever is laudable (I had a case of it in Guatemala, and I never deviate from calling it Break Bone Fever to this day), but the company’s claims that their GE mosquitoes are sterile and they have eradicated the fever are wrong: their mosquitoes are fertile, and no one has successfully eradicated dengue fever from any population.

So, this corporation from overseas gets to use 36-square acres near the Key West Cemetery as a testing plot (undisclosed location) for up to 10,000 genetically engineered mosquitoes.

Many questions about genetically-engineered mosquitoes remain unanswered, and since Friends of the Earth exposed this GE mosquito release story, here’s what that group has to say about the real questions behind the release:

Who’s regulating this release and who more importantly, who will be legally and financially liable if something goes wrong?

Shoot, what about the unintended consequences of decreasing in Aedes aegypti population have on the local food chain and ecosystem? Could other more dangerous bugs take its place, such as the Asian Tiger mosquito which is one of the most invasive species on the planet?

Informed consent? Will Oxitec be required to obtain the free and informed consent of Key West residents (unlike in the Cayman Islands where “no public consultation was undertaken on potential risks and informed consent was not sought from local people”)?

The super-mosquito next generation? What happens when Oxitec’s mosquitoes survive into adulthood (since 3–4 percent have been found to do just that despite the flaw engineered into their genome)?

It’s not just a male thing! Although Oxitec plans to only release male genetically engineered mosquitoes, what are the risks if female genetically engineered mosquitoes are released (since the company sorts them by hand and up to 0.5 percent of the released insects are in fact female)? Since females bite humans, how could this impact human health? Will it hamper efforts to limit the spread of dengue fever?

Do we need more corporate marketing of things like mosquitoes? Since Oxitec cannot completely eliminate a mosquito population will countries and communities become dependent on Oxitec for the indefinite future? What economic impacts will such dependence have on communities?

Two Carrots a Day … and Corporations are NOT People

This entire GMO debate has to be framed by community power over corporate power. The Occupy movement speaks to some of that, and the Move to Amend (reversing or nullifying a Jan. 2010 Supreme Court case, Citizens United) also touches upon some of this corporate malfeasance and misdeeds. But it takes a real in-the-trenches person like Richard Grossman, who died November at age 70, to cut through the bedrock of why these corporations or foundations like Gates have way too much control and power.

He started off 40 years ago talking about how corporations had taken control of our environment. He has since looked at the systemic failure of the United States federal government which has since day one been in cahoots with the oligarchy and land-holding elite:
“One simple way of comparing then and now is that I don’t talk much about corporations anymore. We live under minority rule. And the class of people who do the governing generally could be called a corporate class.

“But 180 years ago, they were the slave master class. One hundred years before that they were the propertied nobility in England. In the USA, a minority designed our structure of governance, has been making the laws, using the power and violence of the nation to deny the many, to accumulate property and wealth, to replicate their designs across generations, to groom leaders of the next generation to continue their supremacy, to create the educational systems, mythologies and celebrations to camouflage and deceive, to channel people who would be activists into realms where even if they stop or slow down a particular corporate state assault, they don’t lay a hand on systemic reality, don’t touch the structure of governance and law, don’t question the country’s great myths. For the past century or so, one such realm has been regulatory and administrative law and agencies, those vast energy sinks and diversions that eat activists for breakfast.”

So what’s for breakfast? Cassava? Friends of the Earth Nigeria is showing why even non-GMO messed-with hybrids pose problems with biodiversity. Using hybridization and selective breeding, three new yellow varieties of cassava with loads of vitamin A will supposedly help with malnutrition, blindness and death.

Can anyone in the Gates’ Foundations AGRA project understand why this supposed research breakthrough gets dismissed by groups like Friends of the Earth Nigeria (FoEN). The argument is around why the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) research team in Ibadan would be messing around with one of Nigeria’s key food crops.

It’s about biodiversity, something corporations scoff at when it comes to finding ways to “beat or speed up mother nature.” Here’s the irony with all of this agronomic meddling: two carrots can easily provide the daily vitamin A requirement.

Plain old carrots for breakfast. Easy to plant, easy to eat, and not one iota of that process is tied up in Dow, Monsanto, General Mills, or Bill Gates, or any stockholders’ greedy interests.

Most Americans are unaware of Jeju or of the U.S. policy of increasing its military presence in Korea, Japan, and the rest of the Pacific — even moving the Marines into Australia. But for the people of Jeju, attempting to nonviolently resist the construction of a new military base, there is an eerie sense of déjà vu.

In fact Jeju’s history is central to how the United States became the militarized nation it has been for over half a century.

Veterans for Peace (VFP) recently sent members to Jeju to monitor the local resistance to this militarization, but they were refused entry by Korean security officials who gave no reasons other than following orders. VFP represents thousands of U.S. military veterans who have participated in various overt and covert U.S. interventions violating the sovereignty of countless countries. This aggressive foreign policy, little mentioned in our history classes, has caused incalculable harm to people, cultures, and the environment. Our personal experiences summon us to carefully re-examine the nature and patterns of U.S. foreign policy. Our clear understanding of past and present imperial adventures compel us to passionately and tenaciously oppose further militarism, war and aggression which we see as severe obstacles to the continuation of our species.

In examining U.S. interventions since World War II, historian William Blum has recently catalogued the following disgraceful record: (1) attempted overthrow of more than 50 governments; (2) attempted suppression of populist and nationalist movements in 20 countries; (3) interference in democratic elections in at least 30 countries; (4) bombing of citizens in 30 countries; and (5) attempted assassinations of more than 50 foreign political leaders.

Shockingly, when all the empirical evidence is scrutinized, the U.S. has militarily intervened nearly 400 times since World War II in nearly 100 countries, while covertly intervening thousands of times. Millions of human beings have been murdered, maimed, and displaced as a result of this egregious, unlawful behavior. Adherence to international and Constitutional law, and honest diplomacy, have been thwarted over and over.

One of the darkest, virtually unknown chapters of U.S. intervention occurred in the southern portions of Korea prior to the Korean War. In 1945, a Joint U.S. Army-Navy Intelligence Study reported that the vast majority of Koreans possessed a strong desire for independence and self-rule, and were vehemently opposed to control by any successor to the hated Japanese who had ruled them since 1910. A subsequent U.S. study reported that nearly 80 percent of Koreans wanted a socialist, rather than capitalist system.

Despite the conclusions of these internal documents, U.S. President Harry Truman, after the Japanese surrender in August 1945, imposed a purportedly temporary partition at Korea’s 38th Parallel dividing a 5,000-year homogenous culture. He then commanded U.S. General Douglas MacArthur to “govern” the people living south of the 38th Parallel. In October 1945, needing a trusted Korean with “an [U.S.] American point of view” to be the U.S. strongman, MacArthur flew 71-year-old Korean-born Syngman Rhee from the U.S. to Seoul on MacArthur’s personal plane. Rhee, a Methodist who had lived in the United States for 40 years, was to be a surrogate ruler of Korea that was largely Buddhist and Confucianist.

Rhee unilaterally chose to hold separate elections in 1948 to “legally” create an artificially divided Korea, despite vigorous popular opposition throughout the Peninsula, north and south of the 38th Parallel, including residents of Cheju Island (now called Jeju, hereafter identified as such). What is referred to as the April 3 (1948) uprising on Jeju in response to these elections, actually lasted into 1950, and is the single greatest massacre in modern Korean history. The Jeju uprising in 1948 may be seen as a microcosm for the impending Korean War.

A CIA National Intelligence Estimate concluded that Rhee was so unpopular that the newly-established Republic of Korea (ROK) would not survive “without massive infusion of U.S. aid.”

The U.S. Embassy described the repression in response to the Jeju opposition to Rhee as a “scorched earth” campaign of “extermination.” Secret protocols placed all Korean Constabulary, police, ROK forces, and paramilitary units under USAMGIK’s (United States Army Military Government In Korea) control.

CIA documents concluded that politics under the USAMGIK and Rhee regime were dominated by a tiny elite class of wealthy Koreans who repressed dissent of the vast majority, using “ruthlessly brutal” policies similar to those of the previous Japanese machinery hated by most Koreans.

Then U.S. Military Governor of Korea, John Reed Hodge, briefed U.S. Congressional Representatives that “Cheju was a truly communal area that is peacefully controlled by the People’s Committee.” Despite this understanding, he commanded three U.S. military officers (among others) – Colonel Harley E. Fuller, Captain John P. Reed, and Captain James Hausman – to advise and coordinate the “extermination” and “scorched earth” campaign. Koreans who had collaborated with the hated Japanese occupiers now served in the U.S.-trained Korean Constabulary and police. Right wing paramilitary units became a brutal element of Rhee’s security apparatus. U.S. advisers accompanied all Korean Constabulary and police (and additional ROK units after 1948) in ground campaigns; U.S. pilots flew C-47s to ferry troops, weapons, war materiel while occasionally directing bombings; and U.S. intelligence officers provided daily intelligence. Additionally U.S. Navy war ships, including the USS Craig, blockaded and bombed the Island, preventing supplies and additional opposition forces from arriving, while preventing flight of boatloads of desperate Islanders.

Hodge’s successor, General William Roberts, declared it was of “utmost importance” that dissenters “be cleared up as soon as possible.” The repressive Japanese organization, “National League To Provide Guidance” (Bo Do Yun Maeng), was expanded by the Rhee regime. Used to systematically identify any Koreans who had opposed Japanese occupation, the League now worked to identify those who opposed the de facto brutal U.S./Rhee rule. Thousands were murdered, jailed, and tortured, and many dumped into the sea as a result.

The Governor of Jeju at the time admitted that the repression of the Island’s 300,000 residents led to the murder of as many as 60,000 Islanders, with another 40,000 desperately fleeing in boats to Japan. Thus, one-third of its residents were either murdered or fled during the “extermination” campaign. Nearly 40,000 homes were destroyed and 270 of 400 villages were leveled. One of Robert’s cohorts, Colonel Rothwell Brown, claimed that the Islanders were simply “ignorant, uneducated farmers and fishers,” a weak excuse for repressing those who, Brown asserted, refused to recognize the “superiority” of the “American Way.”

U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson, and George Kennan, head of the State Department’s Policy Planning, agreed in 1949 that suppression of the internal threat in South Korea, (i.e., Koreans’ passion for self-determination), with assistance of the newly created CIA, was critical to preserving Rhee’s power, and assuring success of the U.S.’s worldwide containment policy. The 1949 Chinese Revolution made repressing the neighboring Korean’s passion for self-determination indispensable for success in the emerging “Cold War,” complementing successful U.S. efforts using CIA covert actions to thwart any socialist movements in Europe following World War II.

The 1949-50 National Security Council study, known as NSC-68, laid out U.S. aims to assure a global political system to “foster a world environment in which the American system can survive and flourish.”

The Korean War that lasted from June 1950 to July 1953, was an enlargement of the 1948-50 struggle of Jeju Islanders to preserve their self-determination from the tyrannical rule of U.S.-supported Rhee and his tiny cadre of wealthy constituents. Little known is that the U.S.-imposed division of Korea in 1945 against the wishes of the vast majority of Koreans was the primary cause of the Korean War that broke out five years later. The War destroyed by bombing most cities and villages in Korea north of the 38^th Parallel, and many south of it, while killing four million Koreans – three million (one-third) of the north’s residents and one million of those living in the south, in addition to killing one million Chinese. This was a staggering international crime still unrecognized that killed five million people and permanently separated 10 million Korean families.

Following the Korean War, Dean Acheson concluded that “Korea saved us,” enabling the U.S. to implement its apocalyptic imperial strategy laid out in NSC-68. In Korea, this meant that the U.S. consistently assured dictatorial governments for nearly 50 years, long after Rhee was forced out of office at age 85 in 1960. Since 1953, the U.S. and South Korea have lived under a Mutual Defense Treaty, Status of Forces Agreements, and a Combined Forces Command headed by a 4-star U.S. general. The fact is that despite claims to the contrary, Korea has never assumed sovereignty since the U.S. imposed division of Korea in 1945. The U.S. has possessed more than 100 military bases and nearly 50,000 troops on Korean soil, and even today has dozens of bases and 28,000 troops stationed there. For decades, the U.S. maintained its main Asian bombing range south of Seoul.

Despite this gruesome history, Koreans began to successfully assert some semblance of democratic governments in the 1990s. However, despite creation of a constitution that protects free speech and basic human rights, Koreans once again are experiencing egregious repression. The Korean residents of pristine Jeju Island vigorously oppose the construction of a deep-water port to host Korean and U.S. guided missile-equipped Aegis Destroyers at the village of Gangjeong. The South Korean government headed by reactionary President Lee Myung Bak is ruthlessly repressing their legitimate, constitutionally-protected free speech. This is not acceptable. The residents of Jeju have a long history of living in peace and harmony. They were brutalized in the late 1940s for wanting independence, and are being brutalized once again for attempting to preserve self-determination. It is déjà vu.

We have been following the daily brutal repression by as many as 1,500 Korean police and security forces of Jeju’s 1,500 residents whose voices of passionate and nonviolent opposition have been completely ignored. When we called the Korean Embassy in Washington, D.C. to ask why this deep-water port construction continues in Gangjeong over objections of more than 90 percent of its residents, the answer has been, “Don’t call us, call your own (U.S.) government.” Political pressure from the U.S. continues to interfere with sovereignty of the Korean people as their own government disrespects, then represses, the free speech of its own citizens despite protections inscribed in the Korean constitution.

We read reports in the Korean press of more than 2600 politicians, journalists and civilians being secretly, illegally spied upon during the current Lee administration. In January 2009, Korea Broadcasting Service (KBS) aired a program that disclosed a secret deal made by the CIA-style Korean National Intelligence Service (NIS), Korean police, and components of the Jeju Island government, to quash any opposition movement to the planned construction of a Jeju deep-water military port, saying such opponents are, in effect, traitors. It is being built by the huge South Korea conglomerate, Samsung, despite watchdog Public Eye citing its history of over 50 years of environmental pollution, trade union repression, corruption and tax flight. Samsung’s power in South Korea is so great that many citizens speak of the “Samsung Republic.”

And we note that the NIS has raided Korean citizens and organizations, even on the mainland, who support the valiant villagers of Gangjeong on Jeju Island who resist the militarization of their Island, of their coastline, of their villages.

The stakes are much higher now that U.S. President Barack Obama has chosen a dangerous policy to militarize the Asia-Pacific region, due to obvious U.S. political intentions to encircle resource-rival China. Jeju, only 300 miles from China’s mainland, is located in a strategic sea route between Japan, Korea, and China. Obama recently dispatched U.S. troops to a northern port of Australia (2,500 miles from China) as part of this plan, while possessing existing jet landing strips in Okinawa (400 miles), Guam (1,900), and new landing bases in Afghanistan (1,000) and Turkmenistan (1,500), and increased strategic relationships with Singapore (1,200) and Philippines (750).

The immensely biodiverse Jeju Island is a most inappropriate location for a deep-water port to host highly armed U.S. and Korean Navy war ships. Former Korean President Roh Moo Kyum designated Jeju as “Jeju Island of Global Peace” when he formally apologized for the April 1948 massacre. A popular tourist vacation spot, famous for honeymooners and sometimes called “women’s Island” due to its matriarchal history, it is also called the “Island of the Gods.” It is Jeju’s incredible unique ecosystem that makes the island so inappropriate for militarizing a deep-water port in quiet coastal village of Gangjeong. It is sheer madness to blow up sacred lava rocks to make way for violent war machines. UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) has designated no less than three World Heritage sites on Jeju, including the Gureombi Lava Rocks being blown up for construction of the Navy destroyer port that are being covered with cement along the coast. UNESCO has also designated nine Geo-Parks on Jeju, as well as designating it as a protected Global Biosphere Reserve that includes Jeju coastlines and its fragile coral reefs.

The Korean government has claimed the deep-water port will also host commercial cruise ships. Their huge weight and 1,000-foot length makes them twice as heavy and long as the 500-550 foot Aegis Destroyers. The port will not be capable of hosting these tourist ships, revealing this dual-use claim as fanciful propaganda.

Our military experiences tell us this plan by Korea and the U.S. to host missile-equipped Aegis Destroyers as part of its global anti-ballistic missile system on the pristine Island of Jeju is extremely threatening to world peace, destroys the peace of the residents of Jeju and Gangjeong village, and flaunts Korea’s Constitutional assurances of protecting free speech of its citizens. We urge the Korean government act decisively to end its continued deference to pressures from the United States, and instead commence pursuing Korea’s legitimate dignity and sovereignty.

More on Jeju Island

The present struggle is directly aimed at the peaceful and happy life of our future generations on this planet.

— Dr. Nguyen Trong Nhan

The widespread employment of the defoliant and herbicide Agent Orange (AO) by the U.S. military during its barbarous war against the peoples of Vietnam should by all accounts be considered one of the greatest war crimes of the twentieth century.  The mass ecocidal-herbicidal campaign to utilize dioxin-containing AO against the tropical environment of Vietnam, begun in 1961 by the liberal-imperialist Kennedy administration, greatly helped facilitate the murder of between 2 and 5 million Vietnamese that was prosecuted by U.S. forces in their war.

Continuing in the traditions practiced previously by Indochina’s French administrators of violently defending colonial relations—and, indeed, vastly extending the scope of these traditions—the U.S. military came to subject the Vietnamese people to a “chemical holocaust,” as writes Fred A. Wilcox, journalist and author of Scorched Earth: Legacies of Chemical Warfare in Vietnam. According to Vietnamese government statistics cited by Wilcox, 3 million Vietnamese are presently suffering from the effects of toxic weapons used by the U.S. in its neo-colonial war, with 500,000 of this total number being children.  150,000 of these minors today suffer specifically from the effects of exposure to AO 40 to 50 years ago, given the biologically persistent properties of dioxin.  As a means of considering and reflecting on these negating realities, Wilcox’s Scorched Earth is an important work, one that resists forgetting—instead attempting adequately to respond to the “call to all humans for help” made by Nguyen Quynh Loc on behalf of his children and all others victimized by AO and war.

As Wilcox reviews, the historical mass-utilization of AO aimed to suppress the Vietcong armed resistance both directly through the eradication of tropical forests that effectively served as a refuge for VC soldiers as well as indirectly by destroying agricultural communities that were suspected of nourishing the VC effort.  The AO defoliation campaign, estimated to have eradicated at least 3 million acres of vegetation, comprised a true scorched earth strategy.  Wilcox quotes Dr. Arthur Westing, one of the world’s foremost chemical experts on the TCCD-dioxin found in AO, as summarizing the general U.S. approach in the war as being characterized by “long term systematic fury inflicted… upon the environment of an enemy dependent for its survival upon a rural natural-resource-based economy.”  It is important not to forget that this highly destructive aspect of the larger counter-insurgency strategy in Vietnam was merely a complement to the mass terror-bombing campaigns carried out by the U.S.—with several hundreds of times the order of magnitude of the Hiroshima bombs being dropped in incendiary and napalm forms on Vietnam, in accordance with Henry Kissinger’s maxim of “anything that flies on anything that moves.”¹

As is to be expected, the herbicide strategy directly destroyed the lives and livelihoods of those deemed to be potential VC supporters by bringing about widespread hunger in rural regions and provoking severe erosion and flooding-events through its devastation of forests.  In part, this dual AO-bombing strategy sought forcibly to depopulate rural regions in its mass-displacement of agriculturalists who then fled to Vietnam’s cities—a vision for which the reactionary public intellectual Samuel P. Huntington famously served as an apologist, thus fulfilling his role as Geheimrat, or adviser of the sovereign, as write Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, or “expert in legitimation,” as Antonio Gramsci or Edward Said might call him.² The “moonscapes” or “parking lot[s]” to which Wilcox likens much of the land of Vietnam ravaged by U.S. imperial administration might serve as a symbol of the overall effects of the mad war on Vietnam’s resident peoples and ecology.

To begin to understand the devastating effects of dioxin exposure on humans, it is necessary to consider some basic biology, which Wilcox provides to us.  Through experimentation on Rhesus monkeys and other animals, scientists have determined the TCCD-dioxin to be carcinogenic and fetotoxic, in addition to being possibly mutagenic, meaning that it induces mutations in DNA.  Among other effects, it acts on animals by inhibiting mitosis, or cell division.  Dioxin has been observed to remain concentrated within fatty tissues for decades—indeed, it is unknown how long it will persist in human tissues.  The toxin is also transplacental, such that it passes from mother to developing fetus.  These considerations thus help explain the emergence of the various disabilities and birth defects seen in children of Vietnamese parents who were exposed to AO by U.S. forces: lack of limbs or eyes, hydrocephaly (large head), musculoskeletal inhibition, severe intellectual impairment, and other neurological effects, to give only a few examples.

Basic reflection on these realities demonstrate the extreme hardships impelled by imperial power relations.  The photographs taken by Wilcox’s son Brendan as printed in the book are a testament to the irrevocable fate to which the U.S. has subjected these children and their families, as to its generalized destruction of the lives of millions of people in Vietnam, as in many other of the world’s societies.  The anecdotal stories Wilcox shares about the means that Vietnamese fighters took to protect themselves from the effects of AO following suspected exposure by spraying—that is, taking baths and eating green beans due to their belief in the antitoxic properties of the latter—similarly well-illustrates the extreme power inequalities represented in the Vietnam War, like other colonial wars.

Rather than be a work that examines horror triumphant, Scorched Earth also examines the litigation efforts undertaken by Agent Orange victims against Dow Chemical and other manufacturers of AO in 1984 and 2004.  The proceedings of the two cases as related by Wilcox are at once disconcerting and typical of established power.  The same Judge Weinstein who presided over both cases practiced legal positivism in denying the plaintiffs’ claims regarding the willfull destruction of human life resulting from AO exposure, perpetuating the reactionary view that the U.S. government was unaware of its effects on humans at the time of its employment, and did not in any case intend directly to harm individuals by using it as an herbicide.  A similarly absurd argument is one advanced by the chemical companies’ legal defense, which claimed that the plaintiffs’ claims, if taken seriously in a court of law, would “risk a stark lack of respect for the Executive Branch” and potentially set a precedent for interfering with its war-making capacities.

Wilcox rightly likens the outcome of this attempt at legalistic redress as being governed by a “Realm” of power, a disorienting and Kafka-esque “magic show” in which dominant social forces hold sway.  As Kafka himself might argue, the fate of the Vietnamese litigants subjected to dioxin poisoning serves as yet another example of the radical inadequacy of approaches that would pursue struggles for justice within established institutions.  It should be evident that the millions of cases of Agent Orange victims to begin with are themselves embodied condemnations of established society, responsible as it is for the “bourgeois-democratic holocaust” that was Vietnam.³  Justice for these persons and all others similarly brutalized by imperial violence cannot be achieved within existing social relations: Wilcox’s elucidation of the juridical proceedings should be seen as confirming this.

This is not to say that Wilcox himself presents his testimony on the Vietnam War within a frame that is expressly anti-racist or revolutionary—however much his findings could be seen to serve these ends.  He invokes the slave-owning Thomas Jefferson to argue against the absurdities of the chemical companies’ legal defense, likening the hegemony of these corporations to that of kings.  Beyond this, Wilcox questionably claims that the US and its allied South Vietnamese military “intended to warn” rural Vietnamese of their plans for mass-application of AO to the environment—as though this postulated intention, never actualized in reality, lessened the actual crime, if it can be said to have existed at all in the first place.  Furthermore, the listing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is glaringly absent from a brief list Wilcox assembles of the usage of chemical and other non-conventional weapons throughout history.  Imperial Japan, Saddam’s Iraq, and Nazi Germany are listed, but the advent of direct employment of nuclear arms against persons is strangely overlooked.  Moreover, Wilcox’s closing words in the book—that we onlookers “ignore” the ongoing suffering of Vietnamese “at our own peril”—seem puzzling: Is the legacy of chemical warfare in Vietnam really about us?  These lapses aside, Wilcox’s book importantly represents a broadside against prejudice, egotistical narcissism, and self-induced blindness.

Representative in this sense is Wilcox’s quoting of Professor Ken Herrmann, an ex-veteran who has dedicated time to researching the effects of AO in Vietnam, as posing the question of why the unavoidably monstrous ongoing legacy of the U.S. military’s crimes in Vietnam does not “haunt the conscience of America.”  Part of the reason for this disconcerting suspension of mind may be due to a lack of awareness, one that Wilcox hence has crucially and helpfully addressed with Scorched Earth.  Yet this absence of awareness is likely associated more broadly with prevailing society’s tendency to render invisible the lived experiences of those persons who suffer the myriad ill-effects of imperialist power-arrangements—the dismissal of the interests of those Chomsky terms “unpeople,” who are even preconsciously denied interests altogether.⁴

The task of overcoming the “bourgeois coldness” Adorno observes as perpetuating life-negating political projects is a decidedly pressing one, given the various threats to life contemporarily observed around the planet, from the endless massacres in Afghanistan to Israel’s continuous bombings of Gaza and the plight of malnourished and ill children or those subjected to radioactive exposure, whether from depleted-uranium rounds, as in Fallujah, or from the melted-down nuclear reactors of Fukushima.⁵  In his comment that the fate of Vietnam is the “toxic mirror into which avaricious corporations do not want ordinary people throughout the world to look,” Wilcox points to the potential collective power of the now subordinated multitudes, hence perhaps pointing to a future possibility that could dismantle imperial rule and so finally succeed in preventing the recurrence of anything resembling the genocidal Vietnam War.

Thus, Wilcox is mistaken to claim that “all we [observers] can do is promise that we will tell [other] people” about the tragic realities of Vietnam.  Documentation and bearing witness—“lend[ing] suffering a voice,” as Adorno advocates—surely are important projects for the present and likely futures, but they are not all.⁶  We observers of the myriad negations perpetrated and overseen by constituted power can, instead of mere spectators, be subjects and agents—actors who rather than resign themselves to world-destructiveness rebel against it, seeking to overturn it.  Against the catastrophe that “just goes on,” in the words of Walter Benjamin, and the “normality” of “death”—the reign of genocidal-imperial racism and environmental devastation, or capitalism—a conscious humanity must labor, abolishing the institutions and ideologies that perpetuate brutality and unreason.⁷

1. Quoted in Noam Chomsky, “‘Losing’ the World: Amercan Decline in Perspective,” Truthout, 15 February 2012.
2. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude (London: Penguin, 2006).
3. Ronald Aronson, The Dialectics of Disaster: A Preface to Hope (London: Verso, 1984).
4. Noam Chomsky, Hopes and Prospects (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2010), 133.
5. Theodor W. Adorno, Critical Models (trans. Henry W. Pickford, New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 201.
6. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics (trans. E.B. Ashton, London: Routledge, 1973), 17-18.
7. Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings. Volume 4: 1938-1940 (trans. Edmund Jephcott et al., Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 2003), 184; Adorno, Minima Moralia, §33.

On learning of Korten’s Club of Rome membership, I asked my self whether a true anti-corporatist would join a Round Table organization of corporate elites. The business executives who participate in Round Table think tanks are legally obligated to make profits and shareholders their highest personal and professional priority. In essence this demands that they do everything in their power to suppress wages, benefits, income tax and environmental regulations. In fact, I can envision no beneficial role whatsoever for corporate think tanks in a truly democratic society. No society run by its own citizens is going to allow upper 1% and the so-called intellectuals who work for them to decide how they rest of us should live.

The History of the Club of Rome

An Internet search reveals there are four main sources of information about the Club of Rome (COR): the Club of Rome website; Lyndon Larouche’s prolific attacks against the Club of Rome; Illuminati and New World Order sites drawing on Larouche’s work; and various climate change denial sites, which portray the entire sustainability movement as an anti-growth conspiracy originating with the COR. The climate change denial movement receives major financial support from billionaire oil barons David and Charles Koch and the Big Coal lobby.¹ I suspect many of the New World Order websites also receive a significant chunk of corporate funding, though this is more difficult to trace.

The Club of Rome grew out of a 1965 international conference called “The Conditions of World Order.” It was held on oil magnate David Rockefeller’s private estate in Bellagio Italy. It was sponsored by the Congress for Cultural Freedom (a well-known CIA front.² ), the Ford Foundation (another well-known conduit for CIA funding), and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Twenty-one “scholars, writers, and scientists” attended this preliminary conference. They issued a report stating that the risk of “nuclear conflagration” made it “incumbent upon intellectuals of the world to play a decisive role in the formation of pressure groups in favor of world order.”

Italian industrialist Aurelie Pecei (major shareholder in Fiat and Italian telecom giant Olivetti), called a follow-up conference, again at Bellegio, in 1968. This second conference resulted in the creation of the Club of Rome (COR), a “think tank” of 75 scientists, industrialists, economists, heads of state and four token liberals: peace activist Norman Cousins; co-founder of the National Organization for Women (NOW) Betty Friedan; Jean Houston, author and pioneer in the “human potential” movement, and Amory Lovins, the environmental scientist who went on to found the Rocky Mountain Institute (dedicated to fostering sustainable business development models).

Limits to Growth

According to the Club of Rome website, their mission is to “maintain a thorough interest” (translation: to lobby governments) in environment and resources, globalization, world development, social transformation (translation: using propaganda to influence popular thinking), and peace and security. They are best known for their 1972 book Limits to Growth, which the COR commissioned a group of MIT researchers to write. Using a mathematical model based on “system dynamics” they examined the future evolution of the global economy by tracking a number of variables across a variety of possible future scenarios. Their conclusion: unless specific measures were taken, the world’s economy would likely collapse some time in 21st century. This collapse would be caused by a combination of resource depletion, overpopulation, and growing pollution.

Attacked Across the Political Spectrum

Limits to Growth raised enormous interest, selling at least twelve million copies in thirty languages. The 1973 oil crisis, a year after its publication, seemed to confirm the authors’ predictions about the global economy’s vulnerability to resource scarcity. The book, which had major influence over the Carter administration, was totally repudiated by later neoliberal leaders (e.g. Reagan and Thatcher) who came to power promoting an unlimited growth agenda. The Catholic Church attacked Limits to Growth for the emphasis it placed on controlling overpopulation. Likewise the John Birch Society and other extreme right groups attacked it for being part of a liberal Rockefeller-initiated conspiracy to create a world government. Even the political left attacked it as a scam to convince workers that a proletarian paradise was impossible.

The most vicious attacks against the Club of Rome and Limits to Growth originated from a former leftist turned right-wing fascist and would be FBI/CIA collaborator.S³ Larouche, a prolific researcher, brags about the letter he received from Club of Rome attorneys, threatening him with legal action.⁴

The Club of Rome and the New World Order

Larouche seems to be the main source of claims that the Club of Rome (COR) is part of a 300-year-old secret sect called the Illuminati and is responsible for a variety of depopulation schemes, as well as a plot to establish a one world government. Much of the inflammatory language on New World Order (NOW) sites is attributed to the Club of Rome but actually originates from Larouche publications.

One example is the 1980 “Global Future: A Time to Act,” which stresses the importance of enacting population policies. Numerous New World Order websites claim this report calls for sterilization and abortion. The original report, available from Law Digital Commons, makes no mention whatsoever of either. This claim actually originates from a 1982 article in Laroche’s Intelligence Review called “Global 2000: Blueprint for Suicide.”

Do Corporations Fund Right Wing Conspiracy Websites?

The owners of these right-wing websites are often dismissed as deluded paranoids. However the consistency of the messages promoted suggests a more sinister and coordinated propaganda agenda. These sites play an important role in discrediting legitimate academic and journalistic research into genuine government crimes (also known as SCADS or State Crimes Against Democracy). Moreover, blaming all the ills of the world on secretive fraternal groups, be they Illuminati, Freemasons, Rothschilds, or Knights of Malta, is very effective in diverting attention from the far more important role corporate lobbies play in undermining the so-called democratic governments of industrialized countries.

The paranoid urban legends created by these right-wing sites also camouflage the reality that the Club of Rome is a powerful anti-democratic group run by corporate elites. Although its membership is a matter of public record, there is also no question that meetings between corporate elites and lawmakers exert major influence on the government and public policy.

Club of Rome Predictions Come True

Over the past few years, skyrocketing energy and food costs, melting ice caps, and unrelenting economic turmoil have clearly borne out the dire predictions Limits to Growth made in 1972. Ironically, Lyndon Larouche and other New World Order critics have also been vindicated (to some extent), owing to the regional and global economic consolidation that has occurred with the creation of the World Trade Organization (WTO), the European Union (EU), the single-currency Eurozone and the western hemisphere trading bloc known as the Free Trade of the Americas Area (FTAA). Most New World Order websites cite the 1973 Club of Rome report entitled “Regionalized Adaptive Model of the Global World System: and their 1976 book Mankind at the Turning Point. Both propose dividing the world into ten regional entities (North America, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, the rest of the developed word, Latin America, the Middle East, Africa, South and Southeast Asia and China) under a single global government.

Are There Natural Links Between the COR and the Sustainability Movement?

So where does David Korten stand in relation to all this? To his credit, Korten has invested substantial personal wealth in the Positives Futures Network and Yes! Magazine. Yet the fundamental themes of his writing and presentations suggest he is unlikely to be manning the barricades any time soon. At present, the anti-corporate movement seems to be split into two main camps. The first believes that the corporatocracy can be brought down by convincing a critical mass of people to withdraw from the corporate economy by forming their own regional and local networks based on sustainable models of development and democratic self-governance. The second, for which environmental activist Derrick Jensen is a major spokesperson, believes that the corporate elite will destroy the earth’s biosphere long before this transformation is complete — through catastrophic climate change, mass species extinction, nuclear Armageddon and/or continued poisoning of our air, water and food with life threatening toxic chemicals. Jensen argues, in the book Endgame and the recent film End:Civ Resist or Die, that the powerful corporate elites must be stopped, by force if necessary. In contrast, Korten appears to be solidly in the first camp. His writings and presentations cover a range of topics about building the community networks necessary to support the post carbon world he envisions. Yet they are short on strategic vision about the best way to bring about this new, non-corporate society.

Currently there seems to be plenty of room for both camps in the anti-corporate movement. However as the Occupy and global anti-austerity movement continue to grow in size and influence, Koreten and other sympathetic members of round table elites such as the Club of Rome will be forced to make a choice: whether to side with those of us willing to actively engage in dismantling capitalism or with the police and military personnel who will seek to shoot us down in the streets.

1. See “Koch Brothers funding climate change denial machine” and “Climate change denial research.”
2. See “The CIA and the cultural cold war revisited.”
3. ee Lyndon Larouche watch.
4. See Club of Rome Complaint.

“People should be aware that the oil is still there,” says Wilma Subra, a chemist who travels widely across the Gulf meeting with fishers and testing seafood and sediment samples for contamination.

Subra says that the reality she is seeing on the ground contrasts sharply with the image painted by BP. “I’m extremely concerned on the impact it’s having on all these sick individuals,” she says. Subra believes we may be just at the beginning of this disaster. In every community she visits, fishers show her shrimp born without eyes, fish with lesions, and crabs with holes in their shells. She says tarballs are still washing up on beaches across the region.

While it's too early to assess the long-term environmental impact, a host of recent studies published by the National Academy of Sciences and other respected institutions have shown troubling results. They describe mass deaths of deepwater coral, dolphins, and killifish, a small animal at the base of the Gulf food chain. "If you add them all up, it’s clear the oil is still in the ecosystem, it’s still having an effect,” says Aaron Viles, deputy director of Gulf Restoration Network, an environmental organization active in the region.

The major class action lawsuit on behalf of communities affected by the spill has reached a proposed 7.8 billion dollar settlement, subject to approval by a judge. While this seems to have brought a certain amount of closure to the saga, environmentalists worry that any settlement is premature, saying they fear that the worst is yet to come. Pointing to the 1989 Exxon spill off the coast of Alaska, previously the largest oil spill in US waters, Viles said that it was several years before the full affect of that disaster was felt. “Four seasons after Exxon Valdez is when the herring fisheries collapsed,” says Viles. “The Gulf has been a neglected ecosystem for decades – we need to be monitoring it closely.”

In the aftermath of the spill, BP flooded the Gulf with nearly 2 million gallons of chemical dispersants. While BP says these chemicals broke up the oil, some scientists have said this just made it less visible, and sent the poisons deeper into the food chain.

It is widely agreed that environmental problems on the coast date back to long before the well blew open. The massive catastrophe brought into focus problems that have existed for a generation. Land loss caused by oil company drilling has already displaced many who lived by the coast, and the pollution from treatment plants has poisoned communities across the state – especially in "cancer alley," the corridor of industrial facilities along the Mississippi River south of Baton Rouge. “The Gulf is a robust ecosystem and it's been dying the death of a thousand cuts for a long time,” says Viles. “BP is legally obligated to fix what they screwed up. But if you’re only obligated to put the ecosystem back to where it was April 19, 2010, why would we?”

In the aftermath of the spill, BP flooded the Gulf with nearly 2 million gallons of chemical dispersants. While BP says these chemicals broke up the oil, some scientists have said this just made it less visible, and sent the poisons deeper into the food chain.

Fishing is a huge part of the economy for the Gulf Coast. Around 40% of the seafood caught in the continental US comes from here. Many area fishermen were still recovering from Hurricane Katrina when the spill closed a third of Gulf waters to fishing for months. George Barisich, president of the United Commercial Fisherman’s Association, a group that supports Gulf Coast fishers, says many fishers still had not recovered from Hurricane Katrina when the oil started flowing from the BP spill.  Now, he says, many are facing losing their homes. “Production is down at least 70 percent,” compared to the year before the spill, he says. “And prices are still depressed thirty, forty, sixty percent.”

In a video statement on BP’s website, Geir Robinson, Vice President of Economic Restoration for BP’s Gulf Coast Restoration Organization, says that the company believes the legal settlement will resolve most legitimate economic claims. “We do have critics,” adds Robinson. “And we’re working hard every day to show them that we will meet our responsibilities.”

Environmentalists and scientists also complain that Obama administration has let down the Gulf Coast. Viles is critical of the role the US government has played, saying that by inaction they seemed to protect BP more than coastal communities or the environment. “The coast guard seems to empower the worst instincts of BP,” Viles says. “I don’t know if it’s Stockholm Syndrome or what.”

International environmental groups have also joined in the criticism. Oceana, a conservation group with offices in Europe and the Americas, released a report on Tuesday criticizing the US government’s reforms as being either ineffective or nonexistent, saying “offshore drilling remains as risky and dangerous as it was two years ago, and that the risk of a major spill has not been effectively reduced.”

Theresa Dardar lives in Bayou Pointe-au-Chien, a Native American fishing community on Louisiana's Gulf Coast. Dardar and her neighbors have seen their land vanish from under their feet within their lifetimes due to canals built by the oil companies to access wells. The canals brought salt water into freshwater marshes, helping cause the coastal erosion that sees Louisiana lose a football field of land every 45 minutes. The main street that runs through the community now disappears into the swamps, with telephone poles sticking out of the water.

Now, in addition to worries about disappearing land and increasing risk of hurricanes, she fears that her family’s livelihood is gone for good.“It’s not going to be over for years,” she says, expressing a widely held concern among fishers here. “We’re just a small Native American fishing community. That’s all they’ve done their whole lives. Some of them are over 60. What are they going to do? If BP gives them money for the rest of their lives, that’s one thing. But if not, then what can they do?"

Not from his high school where he dropped out after his freshman year.

Not from his job, where he worked as an auto body technician for more than 35 years.

Both of his marriages ended in divorce, but did produce two children, a 31-year-old son and a 28-year-old daughter.

June readily admits that for most of his life, beginning about 14 when he began drinking heavily, he was a drunk. Always beer. Almost always to excess. But, he will quickly tell you how many weeks he has been sober. It’s now 56, he says proudly.

In October 2008 he was in an auto accident, when he swerved to miss a deer and hit an oak tree head on. That’s when he learned MRIs showed he had been suffering from degenerative arthritis. Between the accident and the arthritis, he was off work for three months. Then, in May 2009, he was laid off when the company moved.

The pain is now so severe that after about 10 minutes, he has to sit.

Unable to work, surviving on disability income that brings him $1,300 a month, just $392.50 above the poverty line, he lives in the 12-acre Riverdale Mobile Home Village, along the Susquehanna River near Jersey Shore north-central Pennsylvania. The village has a large green area where families can picnic, relax, or play games, sharing the space with geese and all kinds of animals.

For most of the six years June lived in the village, he kept to himself—chatting with neighbors now and then, but nothing that would ever suggest he’d be a leader. The last time he led anything was almost two decades earlier when he was president of a 4-wheel club.

On Feb. 18, the residents found out their landlord had sold the park, only after reading a story in the Williamsport Sun-Gazette. The landlord, who the residents say did what he could to make their village safe and attractive, later came to each of the 37 families. He told the families he sold the park and they would have two months to leave. It was abrupt. Business-like. “We knew he was planning to sell,” says June, “but we all thought it would be to someone who would allow us to stay.”

Four days after the residents were ordered to move, certified letters made it official. The owner sold the park to Aqua PVR, a division of Aqua America, headquartered in Bryn Mawr. Sale price was $550,000. It may have been a bargain—land and industrial parks that have been vacant for years are going for premium sales prices as the natural gas boom in the Marcellus Shale consumes a large part of Pennsylvania and four surrounding states.

Aqua had received permission from the Susquehanna River Basin Commission (SRBC) to withdraw three million gallons of water a day from the Susquehanna; the 37 families of the mobile home village would just be in the way. The company intends to build a pump station and create a pipe system to provide water to natural gas companies that use hydraulic fracturing, the preferred method to extract natural gas from as deep as 10,000 feet beneath the earth. The process, known as fracking, requires a mixture of sand, chemicals, many of them toxins, and anywhere from one to nine million gallons of water per well, injected into the earth at high pressure. Jersey Shore sits in a northeastern part of the Marcellus Shale, which is believed to hold about 500 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.

Aqua isn’t the only company planning to take water in the area. Anadarko E & P Co. and Range Resources-Appalachia have each applied to withdraw up to three million gallons a day from the Susquehanna. While the Delaware River Basic Commission, and the states of New York and Maryland, have imposed moratoriums upon the use of fracking until full health and environmental impacts can be assessed, Pennsylvania and the SRBC have been handing out permits by the gross.

Most residents had only a vague knowledge of fracking and what it is doing to the earth. “They have a lot more knowledge now,” says June, as politically aware as any environmentalist.

Aqua had originally ordered the residents to leave by May 1, but then extended it to the end of the month. It dangled a $2,500 relocation allowance in its eviction.

However, the cost to move a trailer to another park is $6,000–$11,000, plus extra for skirting, sheds, and any handicap-accessible external ramps. But, most trailers can’t be moved. “These are older trailers,” says June. His is a 12-by-70, built in 1974, with a tin roof and tin siding (“tin-on-tin”); like others, it isn’t sturdy enough to survive a move. But even if it did, there would be no place to put it. The parks want the newer trailers, but most parks are full.

So, the residents began looking in the classified ads for rentals. Because the natural gas companies are bringing in thousands of employees to frack the land, there is a shortage of apartments, most with inflated prices to take advantage of the well-paid roustabouts, drivers, and technicians who moved into the area, and spend their money on local businesses eager to improve their own profits. During the past two years, rents have doubled and tripled. “None of us can pay a thousand or more a month,” says June. The current mobile home owners paid $200 a month for their lot.

Not long after he was served his own eviction notice, June had a dream. Some might call it a nightmare; some might see it as he did, a religious experience. “It was Jesus coming to me, telling me I had to do something,” he says.

June is constantly on the move, going from trailer to trailer to help the families who were abruptly evicted. Whatever their needs, Kevin June tries to provide it, constantly on the phone, running up phone bills he knows he can’t afford but does so anyhow because the lives of his neighbors matter.

There’s Betty and William Whyne. Betty, 82, began working as a waitress at the age of 13 and now, in retirement, makes artificial Christmas trees. She has a cancerous tumor in the same place where a breast was removed in 1991. William, 72, who was an electrician, carpenter, and plumber before he retired after a heart attack, goes to a dialysis center three times a week, four hours each time. They brought their 12-wide 1965 Fleetwoood trailer to the village shortly after the 1972 flood. Like the other residents, they can’t afford to move; they can’t find adequate housing. “We’ve looked at everything in about a 30 mile radius,” they say. They earn $1,478 a month from retirement, only $252.17 above the federal poverty line. One son is in New Jersey; one is in Texas, and the Whynes don’t want to leave the area; they shouldn’t have to.

There’s April and Eric Daniels. She’s a stay-at-home mom for their two children; he’s a truck driver whose hours have been reduced. Their 14-by-70 trailer is valued at $13,200; she and her husband were in the process of remodeling it, had already paid $5,000 for improvements, and were about to start building a second bathroom. April Daniels had grown up living in a series of foster houses, “so I know what it’s like to move around, but this was my first home, and it’s harder for me to leave.” Their trailer provides a good home, but can’t be moved. “We’re pretty much on the verge of just tearing down the trailer and living in a camper,” she says. They don’t know what will happen. They do know that because of what they see as Aqua’s insensitivity, they will lose a lot of money no matter what they do.

Doris Fravel, 82, a widow on a fixed income of $1,326 a month, has lived in the village 38 years. She’s proud of her 1974 12-wide trailer with the tin roof. “I painted it every year,” she says. In June, she paid $3,580 for a new air conditioner; she recently paid $3,000 for new insulated skirting. The trailer has new carpeting. Unlike most of the residents, she found housing—a $450 a month efficiency. But it’s far smaller than her current home. So she’s sold or given away most of what she owns. She may have a buyer for the trailer, and will take $2,500 for it, considerably less than it’s worth. “I can’t do anything else,” she says. “I just can’t move my furnishings into the new apartment,” she says. Like the other residents, she has family who are helping, but there’s only so much help any family can provide. “I never knew I would ever have to leave,” she says, but she does want to “see one of those gas men come to my door—and I’d like to punch him in the shoulder.”

Not only are there few lots available and apartments are too expensive, but most residents don’t qualify for a house mortgage; and there are waiting lists for senior citizen and low-income housing. The stories are the same.

No one from Aqua has been in touch with any resident. But, the company did hire a local real estate agency. The agency claims it has made extraordinary efforts to help the residents find other housing. The residents disagree. April Daniels says “some of the Realtors have gotten real nasty with the people in the park—they just don’t understand that we are all in a hardship, so we get mad and frustrated and take it out on them.” But there really isn’t much anyone can do. The natural gas boom has made affordable housing as obsolete as the anthracite coal that once drove the region’s energy economy.

The residents, with limited incomes, have lived good lives; they are good people. They paid their rents and fees on time; they kept up the appearances of their trailers and the land around it. They worked their jobs; they survived. Until they were evicted

And now it’s up to the residents to try to survive. They have become closer; they listen to each other; they hug each other; and, the tough men aren’t afraid to let others see them cry. “The pain in this park is almost too much at times,” says June.

If something goes wrong, the residents have to fix it; Kevin June is the one they call. If he can’t fix a problem, he finds someone who can. In this trailer park, as in most communities, there is a lot of talent—“we help each other,” says June. His job is to make sure the residents survive until they can move. I’ve had the Holy Spirit running through my veins a long time, but it’s running real deep right now,” he says.

A half-dozen families have already moved, but most say they will stay and fight what they see as a politically-based corporate takeover.

During the week Aqua PVR issued eviction notices, its parent company issued a news release, boasting that its revenue for 2011 was $712 million, a 4.2 percent increase from the year before; its net income was $143.1 million, up 15.4 percent from the previous year. But, for some reason, the company just couldn’t find enough money to give the residents a fair moving settlement. “They just expect us to throw our homes into the street and live in tents,” says June.

“I went to see a state representative to ask what he could do to help,” he says, “but his secretary just coldly told me there was nothing that could be done because whoever owns a property can do with it what he wants to do.” He never saw the state representative.

The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania—armed with an industry-favorable law recently rammed through by the Republican-controlled legislature and eagerly signed by a first-term Republican governor who received more than $1,6 million in campaign contributions from the energy industry—has decided that fracking the earth, threatening health and the environment, is far better for business than taking care of the people.

Kevin June and 36 families are just collateral damage.

On the one side are TransCanada Corp. and its numerous oil, gas and water affiliates in North America, joined by their allied politicians in Congress, both Republican and Democrat. They promise more jobs and more non-foreign oil. On the other side are opponents of the pipeline who have sounded the alarm that mining tar sands oil, transporting it, and burning it is dangerous business.

Keystone destruction

The Keystone XL pipeline is a $7 billion scheme to bring tar sands oil, one of the world’s dirtiest fuels, from Canada to Texas refineries. Tar sands crude oil is particularly dangerous to transport because it’s very corrosive and piped at high pressure. In Canada, where tar sands oil is mined, 50 square miles of toxic waste ponds have developed since its production in 2008.

The U.S. extension, known as Keystone XL pipeline, would run through the Ogallala Aquifer, a fresh-water, underground water table covering 174,000 miles in portions of eight states. This is the agriculture heartland of the U.S. A spill of tar sands oil would potentially destroy the drinking water of two million Midwesterners.

One of the biggest lies being spread is that Pipeline XL will create 20,000 jobs. In fact, a Cornell Global Labor Institute study estimates only 2,500 to 4,650 union jobs. And that’s doubtful. Just 11 percent of the construction jobs for Keystone I Pipeline were filled by South Dakotans. Most were for temporary, low paid manual labor.

Fightback fires up

The August 2011 sit-in at the White House, during which a thousand environmental activists were arrested and jailed, was the largest civil disobedience action in 30 years. Then in November, 10,000 encircled the White House, five people deep. The movement finally tasted victory on January 18, 2012, when Obama postponed the construction permit. Hopes were even raised that the Democrats would do something for our environment. But six weeks later Obama, on the campaign trail, announced his approval of a southern piece of the pipeline, from Oklahoma to the Gulf Coast.

Meanwhile, Senate Republicans had lodged a bill amendment that permitted the whole Pipeline XL project to go ahead. In one day, 800,000 messages to the Senate exclaimed, “Hell no!” When the vote took place on March 8, the protesters could once again celebrate a victory.

Environmental author and journalist Bill McKidden called attention to the date of this recent win on March 8, International Women’s Day. “Appropriate,” he wrote, “because many of the very strongest fighters against this project right from the beginning were women of unusual distinction.” He noted in particular Lakota warrior Debra White Plume. She was arrested the day before, along with other tribal members, for blocking massive trucks headed through Indian land. She’s “an eloquent fighter, part of the large crew of indigenous leaders who were the first to sound the alarm about the tar sands and have been at the center of the battle ever since.”

Who backs lethal energy?

The struggle against Keystone is but one front of the larger environmental fight against the destructive forces of Big Oil. Lobbyists for major energy corporations and their Democrat and Republican politician buddies try to talk a good “green” line, because the U.S. public has become savvy and angry about environmental decline. Energy moguls tout false alternatives such as coal, fracking, and nuclear power. All of this is done under the nationalistic guise of reducing dependence on “foreign oil” and restoring American greatness.

Take coal, for example. In an attempt to skirt the Clean Air Act, the U.S. Department of Energy, in cahoots with the coal industry, advances the idea of “clean” coal, or storing carbon dioxide and other gases emitted from burning coal underground. But these by-products of coal are notoriously harmful to the environment, and isolating carbon dioxide could contaminate drinking water and leach gases above ground. Environmental scientists warn that clean coal is a myth, citing the natural resource damage that coal extraction causes, and the ineffective technology for storing carbon dioxide.

Fracking is another scary process being posed as a solution. A haphazard technique of using high-pressure injections of water, sand and chemicals to extract natural gas and petroleum, fracking began in Dimock, Penn. in 2010. The town was left with 13 methane-contaminated water wells, one of which exploded. Cabot Oil & Gas shamelessly denies the poisoned water was due to fracking.

On January 18, 2012, the Environmental Protection Agency called for urgent action to safeguard public health in Dimock. The agency at last acknowledged what residents already knew — their contaminated water resulted from induced hydraulic fracturing. Despite this, Obama championed fracking in his State of the Union Address.

And then there’s nuclear energy. Although the Obama Administration banned the reprocessing of nuclear waste, the federal government is a longtime pursuer of nuclear power. Fully 19 percent of U.S. electricity already derives from nuclear energy. With one breath, our government and energy businesses present this as a “renewable” resource. With their next breath, they cover up evidence of health risks from radioactive waste. Compounding its pollution of soil and ground water in the United States, U.S. production of nuclear energy enhances global nuclear proliferation.

Green capitalism is a lie

Obama’s January postponement of Keystone XL was an early round of the battle, part of the Democrat Party’s attempt to co-opt the green movement. Despite mock battles between congressional Republicans and Democrats, both preach that all this lethal energy is “green” and that capitalism is ecologically friendly.

But capitalism is not now, and never will be, friendly because the profit system trumps human need. Green capitalism is as big a myth as clean coal and safe nukes.

As it exposes the big lies, the environmental movement is expanding in every way. Its bold militancy and increasing grass-roots organizing is a beacon to activists everywhere. The energy war is one the global the 99 percent are determined to win!

• This article first appeared in http://dissidentvoice.org/?p=43598 END:CIV Resist or Die,1) according to the promo, “examines our culture’s systemic addiction to violence and environmental exploitation.” The title is drawn from Pac Man, an arcade came that first came out in 1980. In one of the world’s first video games, the player guides Pac Man, a small faceless mouth, through a maze while he devours Pac Dots and tries to escape blob monsters. The first three minutes of END:CIV superimpose a Pac Man game over images of old growth clear cuts, belching smokestacks, factory hog farms, wild fires, hurricanes and the US military’s ruthless killing machine. The sequence ends as a gigantic “GAME OVER” flashes across the screen.

The film is based on the Endgame, the best selling two volume book Derrick Jensen published in 2006. In Endgame, Jensen argues that mankind urgently needs to bring down “civilization” before it destroys the planet. He bases his case on twenty basic premises he lists at the beginning of both volumes. The film END:CIV examines four of them.

Premise 1 – industrialized civilization has never been and will never be sustainable, mainly because it’s based on non-renewable resources.

The film, like Jensen’s book, traces the rise of cities, which by necessity steal resources from distant regions and eventually denude the entire landscape of those resources. After making the case that the corporate elite are mindlessly and voraciously consuming an ever increasing amount of energy, land, water and other resources, the filmmaker points out that we live on a finite planet. He then argues that corporations will most likely continue this greedy consumption until everything is used up – or until we stop them.

The imagery in this section consists of shot after shot of old growth clear cuts, through which 90% of the earth’s rainforests have been transforms into deserts. It features cameos by indigenous and environmental activists who argue that industrial civilization has created an elaborate infrastructure for a lifestyle that has no future. They also point out that no “clean green path” to sustainable living will ever support the extremely wasteful way of life we have become accustomed to.

Premise 2 – traditional communities don’t willingly allow the confiscation of their natural and mineral resources by capitalist owners. Accordingly, a major focus of industrialized civilization has been to destroy indigenous communities by force. A corollary of Premise 2 is that industrialized civilization would collapse rapidly without, if not for its reliance on widespread violence.

This section juxtaposes common media images of violence with consumption-related adverting and infotainment. For example one split screen shows the aerial bombardment of Baghdad together with jewelry specials from the shopping channel; another depicts Bangladeshi sweatshops alongside a series of tiny butts in skin tight jeans.

In an excerpt from a public forum, Jensen explains that much of violence is invisible and a matter of conditioning. He gives the example of the cop who will pull a gun and drag you to jail if you don’t pay your rent or satisfy your hunger by eating off grocery shelves. He then questions the belief we all grow up with that people have to pay for the right to exist on this planet.

The film goes on to criticize the main message put out by the nonprofit environmental movement we can remedy this pervasive violence and extensive resource theft and exploitation by making politically correct purchase choices. In the view of Jensen and other activists featured in the film, Greenpeace, Sierra Club, Forest Ethics and similar “eco-bureaucracies” have essentially sold out by making preservation of the industrial economy their highest priority and saving the planet secondary. As Jensen points out, future generations won’t care how much we recycled. All they will care about is whether we leave them a living planet.

This section is also highly critical of the dogmatic stance of much of the environmental movement towards nonviolent civil disobedience. Jensen does a great send up of the movie Star Wars. In his version, the rebels don’t destroy Darth Vader by blowing up the death star. Instead they promote eco-tours and Fair Trade products from endangered planets and send waves of compassion and loving kindness towards Darth Vader, as they lock themselves down on his ship. They also vote to condemn and exclude the renegades who propose to blow up the death star – for allowing themselves to be contaminated by Darth Vader’s culture of violence.

Premise 3 – the culture (of industrialized society) as a whole and most of its inhabitants are insane.

The section points out that, contrary to popular belief, no combination of fossil or alternative fuels will allow us to continue our current “happy motoring” society. It focuses on Alberta’s insane tar sands project, the most environmentally destructive enterprise in history. Tar sands production is responsible for the second highest rate of deforestation (second to the Amazon rain forest in the world), as well as massive waterway contamination. All this environmental devastation is occurring to develop a technology that has one of the worst rates of Energy Return on Investment (2:1).²

Premise 4 – from the beginning, the culture of civilization has been a culture of occupation.

The film ends with a brief overview of the resistance movement in Nazi-occupied Europe. In the final scene, Jensen poses the provocative and disarming question: “If your homeland was invaded by aliens who cut down the forests, poisoned the water and air and contaminated your food supply, at what point would you resist?”

1. END:CIV Resist or Die, 2011, directed by Franklin Lopez, (Free [Creative Commons] download
2. EROI refers to the amount of energy returned for each unit of energy required to extract or create the new energy. Even solar photovoltaic cells, which aren’t particularly efficient, have an EROI of 8:1. Saudi oil has an EROI of 10:1. US oil reserves prior to 1970 had an EROI of 23:1. As of 2000, US reserves had an EROI of 8:1 (source: Fleeing Vesuvius).

Disrupt Dirty Power will support direct actions around the U.S. and beyond to combine environmental justice and economic justice. These actions, according to its website, seek to “evict Wall Street polluters,” focusing on “dirty banks, big oil, big coal, fracking, uranium.” It claims that “the climate can’t wait and neither can we.” Initiated by an OWS affinity group called 99forEarth, the effort has been joined by environmental groups.

“The Disrupt Dirty Power campaign was inspired by the fact that political interests supersede what is best for the public,” OWS organizer Will Jesse said. “Big oil and big coal dictate what happens. It is important to do personal things, but that is not enough. We need to pressure politicians and corporations to change how they do things. We need a mass movement to do that,” he added.

The actions will start at the United Nations, which is scheduled to release a sustainability report around that time. The goal is to connect the dots between the big banks funding fossil fuel corporations, which use their huge profits to hire lobbyists and pay off government officials to write legislation that favors big oil and ig coal.

“We’ve been involved with Occupy movements here in the US, and around the world,” Phil Aroneanu, a co-founder and US Campaign Director of the large international environmental group 350.org writes on its website. “From Tahrir to Tulsa, ordinary people are turning out in droves to fight inequality and push for greater democracy. Climate Change is entering into the occupy movement in unprecedented ways, from occupiers joining the Keystone XL campaign last year, to March 24th’s Disrupt Dirty Power day of action.”

The Keystone campaign successfully mobilized thousands of people to demonstrate outside the White House, over a thousand of whom were arrested. They managed to stop, at least for now, the drilling of a pipeline to take tar sand oil from Canada to the Texas coast. It would wreak havoc not only on the ground but would be a potential catastrophe for the US. water supply, as well as release an immense amount of greenhouse gas emissions.

The effective actions by 350.org and others are examples of the environmental movement taking off its gloves to confront big oil and its governmental allies. 350.org offered a guest post online about Earth Month from 99forEarth. This action initiates a new stage in Occupy—joining forces with the grassroots environmental movement and placing the climate crisis at the forefront of the global social movement.

It calls on people “to move your money into community banks and credit unions,” because of the extensive environmental damage done by the alliance of big banks and fossil fuel corporations. In addition to personal accounts, this call extends to schools, local businesses, churches, community groups, and government agencies to move their funds. It seeks to mobilize the 99% to stop investing in dirty power and “pull the plug on banks that do.”

“We have been involved with 99forEarth since it was conceptualized a few months ago,” said Aroneanu in a phone interview. “We see government corruption as endemic. We need to take a systems approach, as Occupy does, and take it head on. Many of our volunteers have been involved with Occupy.”

In the Washington, D.C. area, 350.org will collaborate with Occupy in an End Power Madness regional action targeting Dominion Energy, a public utility that monopolizes the area and generates electricity from coal. “We plan to bring 300 to 500 people to surround Dominion in Richmond, Virginia. They use underhanded tactics, like banks do, to block environmental legislation.”

350.org has organized over 15,000 community-based actions in 188 countries, according to Aroneanu. “We share the idea with Occupy that we need to get people into the streets and hold corporations accountable for the corruption that is going on in government,” he added. 350.org plans to take on the $20 billion dollar subsidy that fossil fuel corporations receive from the federal government in future actions.

Among Disrupt Dirty Power’s targets are Wells Fargo, Exxon Mobil, Peabody Coal, Alta Natural Resource, Citi, Chase, PB and Bank of America, which is already vulnerable. Some investment counselors say BofA may fail as early as this year. Another bailout?

Those expected in New York include college students from Tennessee and elsewhere. In addition to New York’s action, at least a dozen other places already have signed on to the campaign. As people hear about it during the month, its organizers hope that they will join and develop their own de-centralized plans. Among those actions are the following:

• Occupy Portland’s Environment Group — walking tour of the city’s worse environmental offenders.
• Occupy London’s Environmental Action Group—March 23 march from St. Paul’s Cathedral to make the connection between corrupt government and dirty power.
• Vancouver’s No to Endbridge—March 26 action in coordination with First Nation peoples against the exploitation of Alberta’s Tar Sands.
• Vermont’s Yankee nuclear power plant — a freeze on Fukishima.
• Raleigh, North Carolina — a March 31 Conference for the Abolition of Mountaintop Removal.
• Richmond, Washington — action at the Hanford nuclear power plant.
• Las Vegas—Moata tribe will travel by foot from their homes to the federal building to shut down the Reid Gardner Coal plant, supported by Occupy Las Vegas.

Groups that have something to add as the month unfolds can contact the Disrupt Dirty Power website. “We hope this will be a model that others pick up. We have no central command for the national actions,” organizer Rebecca Manski noted.

“As we build the narrative of this movement through our direct action,” Manski added, “it is important to bring back the environmental justice message that Occupy started with. Economic justice and environmental justice are inseparable.”

It makes no difference if it’s timber, oil, or coal. In the 1970s and 1980s, the nuclear energy industry promised well-paying jobs, clean energy, and a safe health and work environment. Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, Fukushima Daiichi, and thousands of violations issued by the Nuclear Regulatory Agency, have shown that even with strict operating guidelines, nuclear energy isn’t as clean and safe as claimed. Like all other energy industries, nuclear power isn’t infinite. Most plants have a 40–50 year life cycle. After that, the plant becomes so radioactive hot that it must be sealed.

In the early 21st century, the natural gas industry follows the model of the other energy corporations, and uses the same rhetoric. James M. Taylor, senior fellow at the Heartland Institute, claims on the Institute’s website, “The newfound abundance of domestic gas reserves promises unprecedented energy prosperity and security.”

The energy policy during the eight years of the George W. Bush–Dick Cheney administration was to give favored status to the industry, often at the expense of the environment. In addition to negating Bill Clinton’s strong support for the Kyoto Protocol, signed by 191 countries, to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, former oil company executives Bush and Cheney pushed to open significant federal land, including the 19 million acre Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), to drilling that would disrupt the ecological balance in one of the nation’s most pristine areas.

A study by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), published in 2004 concluded that fracking was of little or no risk to human health. However, Wes Wilson, a 30-year EPA environmental engineer, in a letter to members of Congress and the EPA inspector general, called that study “scientifically unsound,” and questioned the bias of the panel, noting that five of the seven members had significant ties to the industry. “EPA’s failure to regulate [fracking] appears to be improper under the Safe Water Drinking Act and may result in danger to public health and safety.”

The following year, the Energy Policy Act of 2005 — on a 249–183 vote in the House and an 85–12 vote in the Senate — exempted the oil and natural gas industry from the Safe Water Drinking Act. That exemption applied to the “construction of new well pads and the accompanying new roads and pipelines.” The National Defense Resource Council noted that the EPA interpreted the exemption “as allowing unlimited discharges of sediment into the nation’s streams, even where those discharges contribute to a violation of state water quality standards.” The exemption became known derisively as the Halliburton Loophole, named for one of the nation’s major energy companies, of which Cheney, whose promotion of Big Business and opposition to environmental policies is well-documented, had once been the CEO.

Bills introduced in the U.S. House (H.R. 2766) and U.S. Senate (S. 1215) in June 2009 to give federal regulatory oversight under the Safe Water Drinking Act to hydraulic fracturing languished. New bills (H.R. 1084 and S. 587), introduced in March 2011 in the 112th Congress, are also expected to die without a vote.

The natural gas industry has a long history of effective lobbying at the state and national level. America’s Natural Gas Alliance has four former Congressmen as lobbyists, according to research by the Center for Responsive Politics (CRP). Through various political action committees (PACs), the industry has contributed about $238.7 million in campaign contributions, about three-fourths of it to Republican candidates, since 1990, according to the CRP. For the 2008 election, the gas and oil industry contributed $27.4 million, including contributions from individuals, PACs, and soft money, according to CRP data. Total contributions for the current election cycle, as of mid-March, are $20.6 million, with almost 90 percent of it going to Republicans.

At the federal level, the top recipients of oil and gas contributions during the current election cycle, according to the CRP, are former presidential hopeful Gov. Rick Perry of Texas ($833,674), Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst of Texas ($650,850), presidential hopeful Mitt Romney ($597,950), Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell ($264,700), and Sen. John Barasso of Wyoming ($225,400), a member of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee. Every one of the top 20 recipients is a Republican.

Barack Obama, although significantly more environmental friendly than his predecessor, had opened up off-shore drilling just prior to the BP oil spill in the Gulf Coast in April 2010. He has repeatedly spoken against the heavy use and dependence upon fossil fuels, and sees the expanded use of natural gas as a transition fuel to expanded use of wind and solar energy. Nevertheless, he has still received funding from the natural gas industry. During the 2008 presidential campaign, he received $920,922 from the oil and gas industry, according to data compiled by the CRP. His opponent, Sen. John McCain, according to CRP, accepted $2,543,154.

In contrast, the 1.4 million member Sierra Club, since August 2010, has refused to accept any donations from the natural gas industry. The Sierra Club, which has actively opposed the development of coal as an energy source, had received $27 million since 2007 from Chesapeake Energy. By 2010, “our view of natural gas [and fracking] had changed [and we] stopped the funding relationship between the Club and the gas industry, and all fossil fuel companies or executives,” says Michael Brune, Sierra’s executive director.

Mixed into Pennsylvania’s energy production is not only a symbiotic relationship of business and government, but a history of corruption and influence-peddling. Between 1859, when an economical method to drill for oil was developed near Titusville, Pa., and 1933, the beginning of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “New Deal,” Pennsylvania, under almost continual Republican administration, was among the nation’s most corrupt states. The robber barons of the timber, oil, coal, steel, and transportation industries essentially bought their right to be unregulated. In addition to widespread bribery, the energy industries, especially coal, assured the election of preferred candidates by giving pre-marked ballots to workers, many of whom didn’t read English.

In a letter to the editor of The New York Times in March 2011, John Wilmer, a former attorney for the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), explained that “Pennsylvania’s shameful legacy of corruption and mismanagement caused 2,500 miles of streams to be totally dead from acid mine drainage; left many miles of scarred landscape; enriched the coal barons; and impoverished the local citizens.” His words serve as a warning about what is happening in the natural gas fields.

Pennsylvania’s new law that regulates and gives favorable treatment to the natural gas industry was initiated and passed by the Republican-controlled General Assembly and signed by Republican Gov. Tom Corbett. The House voted 101–90 for passage; the Senate voted, 31–19. Both votes were mostly along party lines.

In addition to forbidding physicians and health care professionals from disclosing what the industry believes are “trade secrets” in what it uses in fracking that may cause air and water pollution, there are other industry-favorable provisions.

The new law guts local governments’ rights of zoning and long-term planning, doesn’t allow for local health and environmental regulation, forbids municipalities to appeal state decisions about well permits, and provides subsidies to the natural gas industry and payments for out-of-state workers to get housing but provides for no incentives or tax credits to companies to hire Pennsylvania workers.

It also requires companies to provide fresh water, which can be bottled water, to areas in which they contaminate the water supply, but doesn’t require the companies to clean up the pollution or even to track transportation and deposit of contaminated wastewater. The law allows companies to place wells 300 feet from houses, streams and wetlands. The law also allows compressor stations to be placed 750 feet from houses, and gives natural gas companies authority to operate these stations continuously at up to 60 decibels, the equivalent of continuous conversation in restaurants. The noise level and constant artificial lighting has adverse effects upon wildlife.

As a result of all the concessions, the natural gas industry is given special considerations not given any other business or industry in Pennsylvania.

Each well is expected to generate about $16 million during its lifetime, which can be as few as ten years, according to the Pennsylvania Budget and Policy Center (PBPC). The effective tax and impact fee is about 2 percent. Corbett had originally wanted no tax or impact fees placed upon natural gas drilling; as public discontent increased, he suggested a 1 percent tax, which was in the original House bill. In contrast, other states that allow natural gas fracking have tax rates as high as 7.5 percent of market value (Texas) and 25–50 percent of net income (Alaska). The Pennsylvania rate can vary, based upon the price of natural gas and inflation, but will still be among the five lowest of the 32 states that allow natural gas drilling. Over the lifetime of a well, Pennsylvania will collect about $190,000–$350,000, while West Virginia will collect about $993,700, Texas will collect about $878,500, and Arkansas will collect about $555,700, according to PBPC data and analyses.

State Sen. Daylin Leach, a Democrat from suburban Philadelphia, says he opposed the bill because, “At a time when we are closing our schools and eliminating vital human services, to leave billions on the table as a gift to industry that is already going to be making billions is obscene.” State Rep. Mark Cohen, a Democrat from Philadelphia, like most of the Democrats in the General Assembly, agrees. The legislation, he says, “produces far too little revenue for local communities, gives the local communities local taxing power which most of them do not want, because it pits one community against the other, and gives no revenue at all to other areas of the state.”

The new law is generally believed to be “payback” by Corbett and the Republican legislators for campaign contributions. The industry contributed about $7.2 million to Pennsylvania candidates and their PACs between 2000 and the end of 2010, including $860,825 to the Republican party and $129,100 to the Democratic party, according to data compiled by Common Cause. In addition, the natural gas industry contributed about $1.6 million to Corbett’s political campaigns during the past 10 years, about $1.1 million of that for his campaign for governor, according to Common Cause. Rep. Brian L. Ellis (R-Butler County), sponsor of the House bill, received $23,300. Sen. Joseph B. Scarnati (R- Warren, Pa.), the senate president pro-tempore who sponsored the companion Senate bill (SB 1100), received $293,334. Of the 20 Pennsylvania legislators who received the most money from the industry since 2001, 16 are Republicans, according to Common Cause.

Rep. H. William DeWeese (D-Waynesburg, Pa.), received $58,750, the most of the four Democrats. DeWeese, first elected in 1976, had been Speaker of the House and Democratic leader.

It’s possible that the significant campaign contributions didn’t influence Pennsylvania’s politicians to rush to embrace the natural gas industry and its controversial use of hydraulic fracking. It’s possible that these politicians had always believed in fracking, and the natural gas industry was merely contributing to the campaigns of those who believed as they do. However, with the heavy amount of money spent by the natural gas lobby and, apparently, willingly accepted by certain politicians, there is no way to know how they might have voted had no money or lobbying occurred.

Tom Corbett’s first major political appointment after his election in November 2010 was to name C. Alan Walker, an energy company executive, to head the Department of Community and Economic Development. The Pennsylvania Progressive identified Walker as “an ardent anti-environmentalist and someone who hates regulation of his industry.” A ProPublica investigation revealed that Walker had given $184,000 to Corbett’s political campaign.

Shortly after taking office, Corbett repealed environmental assessments of gas wells in state parks. The result could be as many as 2,200 well pads on almost 90 percent of all public lands, according to Nature Conservancy of Pennsylvania.

Corbett’s public announcements in March 2011, two months after his inauguration, established the direction for gas drilling in Pennsylvania.

In his first budget address, Corbett boldly declared he wanted to “make Penn­syl­va­nia the hub of this [drilling] boom. Just as the oil com­pa­nies decided to head­quar­ter in one of a dozen states with oil, let’s make Penn­syl­va­nia the Texas of the nat­ural gas boom. I’m deter­mined that Penn­syl­va­nia not lose this moment.” Lt. Gov. Jim Cawley would later boast, “The Marcellus [Shale] is revitalizing our main streets in downtowns.”

Within the budget bill, Corbett authorized Walker to “expedite any permit or action pending in any agency where the creation of jobs may be impacted.” This unprecedented reach apparently applied to all energy industries. That same month, Corbett created an Advisory Commission, loaded with persons from business and industry. Not one member was from the health professions; of the seven state agencies represented, not one member was from the Department of Health.

Between 2007 and the end of 2010, the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) issued 1,435 violations to natural gas companies; 952 of those violations related to potential harm to the environment. In March, Michael Krancer, the new DEP secretary, also a political appointee, took personal control over his department’s issuance of any violations. By Krancer’s decree, every inspector could no longer cite any well owner in the Marcellus Shale development without first getting the approval of Krancer and his executive deputy secretary.

“It’s an extraordinary directive [that] represents a break from how business has been done” and politicizes the process, John Hanger told ProPublica. Hanger, DEP secretary under the Ed Rendell administration, said the new rules “will cause the public to lose confidence entirely in the inspection process.” He told the Scranton Times-Tribune the new policy was the equivalent of every trooper having to get permission from the state police commissioner before issuing a traffic citation.  Because the new policy is so unusual and broad “it’s impossible for something like this to be issued without the direction and knowledge of the governor’s office,” said Hanger. Corbett denied he was responsible for the decision. Five weeks after the Krancer decision was leaked to the media, and following a strong negative response from the public, environmental groups, and the state’s media, the DEP rescinded the policy—which Krancer claimed was only a three-month “pilot program.”

“When state agencies say they will ‘regulate’ or ‘monitor’ hydraulic fracturing to reduce known threats, we should not accept this as a guarantee of any kind,” says Eileen Fay, an animal rights/environmental writer. Fay argues that because of legislative corruption, it is a responsibility of citizens to protect their own health and environment by “putting pressure on our legislators.”

In February 2012, Corbett proudly signed Act 13, a merger of the House and Senate bills.

HB 1950 had initially included a provision to provide up to $2 million a year in funding to the Department of Health for “collecting and disseminating information, preparing and conducting  health care provider outreach and education and investigating health related complaints and other uses associated with unconventional natural gas production activity.” That provision, strongly supported by numerous public health and environmental groups, was deleted in the final bill.

The Pennsylvania Constitution (Article I, section 27) declares:

 The people have a right to clean air, pure water, and to the preservation of the natural, scenic, historic and esthetic values of the environment. Pennsylvania’s public natural resources are the common property of all the people, including generations yet to come. As trustee of these resources, the Commonwealth shall conserve and maintain them for the benefit of all the people.

However, unlike New York state, which placed a moratorium on well permits while it is evaluating the health and environmental risks, Pennsylvania has rushed to embrace the natural gas industry and its use of fracking, apparently disregarding its own Constitution. The Susquehanna River Basin Commission has routinely approved requests from drillers to remove millions of gallons of water each day from the river, although the commissioners have not requested any health impact statements or undertaken a complete cumulative impact study, according to Iris Marie Bloom, an environmental writer and activist. Because of the nature of the Marcellus Shale deposit in Pennsylvania, as opposed to neighboring states, natural gas companies have to transport the wastewater to other states for re-use or disposal or take it to sewage treatment plants. The plants then discharge the treated wastewater into the state’s rivers. However, present methods can’t remove the salt and some other chemicals and radioactive elements. Currently, about 11 million gallons of wastewater a day are taken from the Susquehanna for fracking operations; about three times that amount is anticipated when fracking reaches its peak in the state, according to Paul Swartz, Commission executive director. In contrast, the Delaware River Basic Commission has put a moratorium on taking water from that river until studies have been completed.

Pennsylvania is “handing out permits almost like popcorn in a theater,” says Diane Siegmund, a psychologist from Towanda. Between Jan. 1, 2005 and March 2, 2012, the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection issued 10,232 permits, and denied only 36 requests.

Siegmund is frustrated by what she sees not only as state government’s acceptance of fracking but of numerous local governments in the Marcellus Shale region from speaking out on behalf of the preservation of health and the environment. When she went to the Bradford County commissioners with stacks of research about problems with fracking, “all they did was to thank me and claim it’s not their problem.” She says residents are beginning to believe that local governments are operating in collusion with the energy companies.

But it isn’t just governments. The issue of fracking has divided towns like Dimock, Pa. In November 2009, 15 residents sued Cabot Oil and Gas, charging that the company contaminated their drinking water. Tests conducted by the DEP during the last years of the Ed Rendell administration had revealed there was higher than expected methane gas in 18 water wells that provided drinking water to 13 homes near the drills. The build-up of methane gas had also led to well explosions and DEP warnings to citizens to keep their windows open. Among the provisions of a consent order, the state required Cabot to provide fresh water to families whose water had been affected by the excess methane gas. Cabot denied its fracking operation was responsible for the elevated levels. On November 30, 2011, after the DEP, now under the Tom Corbett administration, declared the water to be safe to drink, Cabot stopped delivering water.

And then something strange happened. The town of Binghamton, N.Y., about 35 miles north, said it would provide a tanker of fresh water. However, the supervisors of Dimock Twp., supported by most of the 140 residents who attended the meeting, most of them with some economic ties to the natural gas industry, refused the offer. According to reporting in the Scranton Times-Tribune, when Binghamton mayor Matthew T. Ryan asked “Why not let people help?” he was rebuffed by one of the township’s three supervisors who snapped, “Why should we haul them water? They got themselves into this. You keep your nose in Binghamton.”

In January 2012, after declaring that the water “contains levels of contaminants that pose a health concern,” the EPA decided it would bring water to residents in Dimock. The response by Cabot was that the EPA was wasting taxpayer money in its investigation of Cabot environmental and health practices. The response by Pennsylvania’s DEP was almost as inflammatory as the water in the taps. Michael Krancer, DEP’s head, not only disagreed with the EPA findings, he called the agency’s knowledge of fracking to be “rudimentary.”

In mid-March, following preliminary tests on several of the wells serving Dimock residents, the EPA found that the water “did not show levels of contamination that could present a health concern.” However, it acknowledged arsenic, some metals, and potentially explosive methane gas remained in the water. A ProPublica investigation revealed that four of the five water samples it obtained showed methane levels exceeding Pennsylvania standards.

“We are deeply troubled by Region 3’s rush to judge the science before testing is even complete, and by their apparent disregard for established standards of drinking water safety,” said Claire Sandberg, executive director of Water Defense. She questioned why EPA Region 3’s handling of the Dimock case differed from how other EPA regional offices handled similar cases in Texas and Wyoming when it didn’t release the information until all testing was completed. Dr. Ron Bishop, professor of biochemistry at SUNY/Oneonta, told ProPublica, “Any suggestion that water from these wells is safe for domestic use would be preliminary or inappropriate.”

The extraction of natural gas has also led to the development of other industries—and the exploitation of the people. In Jersey Shore, Pa., about 20 miles west of Williamsport, Aqua PVR bought a 37-unit mobile home village, with plans to build a water withdrawal plant to provide up to three million gallons a day to the natural gas industry. The day the purchase was completed on February 23, 2012, Aqua told the residents their leases were terminated “immediately,” according to reporting in the Sun-Gazette. The company gave residents until May 1 to leave. To sweeten what may be seen as a callous corporate action, Aqua said it would give $2,500 to each resident that moved by April 1, and $1,500 if they moved by May 1. However, as the Sun-Gazette reported, the cost to move each mobile home ranged from $5,000 to $12,000. Many of the residents lived in the village more than a decade; one was there 38 years. The newspaper reported that most trailer parks in the area were already at maximum occupancy, and others would not accept the older trailers.

“Residents are afraid to speak up,” says Diane Siegmund, who points out there is “a lot of fear” among the residents, those whose lives are being uprooted, those whose health is being compromised, and those whose economic benefits may be compromised if fracking operations are reduced.

“As long as the powers can keep the people isolated and fragmented,” says Siegmund, “the momentum for change can never be gained.” The experience in Dimock is seen throughout the Marcellus Shale region.

It’s not unreasonable to expect people who are unemployed or underemployed to grasp for anything to help themselves and their families, nor is it unreasonable to expect that persons—roustabouts, clerks, truck drivers, helicopter pilots, among several hundred thousand in dozens of job classifications—will take better paid jobs, even if it often means 60 hour work weeks under hazardous conditions. It’s also not unreasonable to expect that families living in agricultural and rural areas, who are struggling to survive, will snap at the lure of several thousand dollars to lease mineral rights and some of their land to an energy company, which will also pay royalties. But what is unreasonable is that government allows corporations to flourish at the expense of the people and their environment.

The Sierra Club urges that the country needs “to leapfrog over gas whenever possible in favor of truly clean energy. Instead of rushing to see how quickly we can extract natural gas, we should be focusing on how to be sure we are using less—and safeguarding our health and environment in the meantime.”

Christopher Portier, director of the National Center for Environmental Health, calls for more research studies that “include all the ways people can be exposed [to health hazards], such as through air, water, soil, plants and animals.”

In November 2011, the Advisory Board of the U.S. Department of Energy concluded: “The public deserves assurance that the full economic, environmental and energy security benefits of shale gas development will be realized without sacrificing public health, environmental protection and safety.”

When the history of natural gas exploration in Pennsylvania is finally written, the story will be that it was a cheaper, cleaner energy source, and that it temporarily helped some people in rural areas, and brought some well-paying jobs into the state. But history will probably also record that the lure of immediate gratification led Pennsylvania’s politicians to willingly accept political donations that led them to sacrifice their citizens’ health and the state’s environment.

• Assisting on this series, in addition to those quoted within the articles, were Rosemary R. Brasch, Eileen Fay, and Dr. Wendy Lynne Lee.

All across the country cities are seeing record or near-record highs, a string lasting nearly two weeks. It’s as though Spring, 2012, can’t wait. Instead of the usual sequence of blooming flowers and trees, it’s as though everything is condensed and blooming at the same time. Very strange.

Many of us see this as another obvious example of aberrant weather due to global warming. Our use of fossil fuels continues almost unabated, as energy corporations leverage their stranglehold on our energy systems to push for more dirty oil and natural gas use. Their failure to value our planet, when it is so obviously stressed, is but one of their many crimes of corruption, legal or not.

This strange, early spring points to our federal government as well, and its failure in its basic duty to protect us from such undue corporate influence. Indeed, not only is the government hapless in the face of this climate crisis, it’s actually an accomplice to big oil in this process. Energy subsidies and tax abatements are still the norm. Our government is literally paying big oil to slowly kill us off.

But could there be more to wild weather than just global warming? More and more of us recognize that we do not inhabit a mechanical world. Life on Earth is more than a machine. It’s alive, and it’s our constant experience. We live here, in these bodies and in this experience of life. And we’re learning that life contains energies and awareness we have long ignored.

What of the emotional reprieve from this early bounty of warmth? What of the energy of so many of us able to be outside much earlier in the year than is typical? What about the cerebral curiosity from experiencing such out of whack weather?  While still anecdotal data, this anomaly of record and near-record temperatures across so much of the country may portend a year of great abnormalities, and not all those related to weather.

We see a spring that can’t wait in the Occupy Movement. After a relatively quiet winter, Occupational activities are on the upswing, with the promise of a summer of political and activist actions like never before. Occupy is finding its focus and its grounding, and and the implications are yet to be understood. There are actions planned around the G8 and NATO Summits; plans for May Day and July 4th;  plans to interject ourselves, however we may, into this corrupt system to clog it; and plans to extricate ourselves from this system to starve the beast.

But this fateful spring belongs to far more than Occupy and those uprising across the planet. It belongs to all of us, human and non-human members of Life on Earth. It belongs to us more than ever because we are recognizing that we belong to the Earth like never before. We are finding our connection to Earth and our kindredness to each other, even as the corporate media keep trying to pull our focus ‘off the ball’ of our Life here together in this moment.

The surge of energies being unleashed in these times is profound. It is seen in the negative energy that causes a ‘hater’ named George Zimmerman to cross the line and kill a young African American,Trayvon Martin, in Florida. It may be the delusional Staff Sergeant Robert Bales whose ‘too much war and too many tours’ past led him to murder 16 Afghani people. It may be the continued stridence of Israel in addressing their Palestinian neighbors, or the over-reaching of Wall Street executives even after it has become apparent that their behavior took down our economy and wrecked millions of lives. This negative energy has been at the heart of the global system for a generation.

But the greater portion of these emerging energies seem designed to heal. The local food movement, sustainable energy production, efforts to reverse the massive influence of corporations on legislators, and efforts to end the permanent war paradigm are all gaining strength. Millions of us our finding our voices like never before. We’re sharing our brotherhood and sisterhood with a new-found trust and endearing warmth. Energies of peace and love are emerging spontaneously, in spite of the resistance from the controlling powers. Energies that will no longer allow the Juggernaut of corporate power to destroy our lives and our Earth in the unholy lust for power.

Finally, there are other curiosities of our time – Spring, 2012. There is an alignment taking place this year between our sun and the galactic center. There is the Mayan prediction of the ‘end of the world’ coming before this year ends – which could mean the end of the corrupt culture we’ve all be subjected to. And there is the growing view within science that our reality is ‘holographic’ – amenable to our attention and reactive to consciousness.

This spring cannot wait because we cannot wait. Our broken system must be replaced by a system of ethics – principles like peace and love – because if we do not change, we die. This spring that cannot wait may be the very force of Life, conspiring with Sun and Earth, to bring about the end of globalization and to create a new narrative of peace and love.

“Far away, on the southern cone of South America in Chilean Patagonia, exists one of the most beautiful, still-virgin territories on Earth. There, an intense struggle is taking place that most Canadians have never heard of, but that intimately involves the Canadian mining industry, the Canadian government, and millions of Canadian pensioners and investors,” notes Council of Canadians chairperson Maude Barlow in the report’s introduction.

The report, Chilean Patagonia in the Balance: Dams, Mines and the Canadian Connection, asserts that Canada’s mining industry, which leads the world in mining investment with more than half of its assets in Latin America, accounts for 33 percent of electricity demand in Chile while advantageously exercising enormous influence in setting government policy there.

The report focuses on the Aysén region, which has seen protests and social discord since the announcement that the hyrdroelectric “development” plan would move forward last May. The project will potentially affect 12 of Aysén’s major rivers and involve five dams on the Baker and Pascua Rivers.

The project, which also includes the construction of power lines from the Aysén region to Santiago, will cause the “deforestation of 23,000 hectares, and six national parks” and damage to “11 national reserves,” reported The Guardian. The environmental nonprofit International Rivers has also indicated that the project would forcibly displace many families, would flood many of the area’s best agricultural and ranching lands, and would endanger rare animal species.

The report states:

Transelec, the only transmission company currently operating in Chile that is even remotely capable of building HidroAysén’s link to energy markets, is owned by a Canadian consortium led by Brookfield Asset Management, with partnership from the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board and another public sector investor, the British Columbia Investment Management Corporation. Canadian capital is instrumental in making HidroAysén and projects like it both attractive and possible.

As many as 50,000 protesters marched in opposition to the project in May 2011, while the national daily La Tercera reported that 74 percent of Chileans oppose the project.

The HidroAysén dam project’s Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA), which was approved in May 9, 2011, has come under fire. According to Chile’s Christian Democrat party Deputy Sergio Ojeda, chair of a congressional committee charged with investigating the EIA, it was riddled with flaws.

“It appears that the HidroAysén project should not have been approved,” Ojeda told El Mercurio. “It is evident that the Environmental Impact Assessment suffers from a number of flaws that allow megaprojects like HidroAysén to not be evaluated with much rigor.”

Social movements in the region and nationally across Chile have remobilized with demonstrations and roadblocks last month to not only protest the project, but to demand reforms to address other social and infrastructure problems.

“We have initiated a process of permanent and long-term demonstrations to trigger a change in the regional development that until now has focused essentially on the benefit of interests that do not belong to those who live in Aysén,” wrote leaders of various constituencies that make up the Social Movement for the Aysén Region in a letter to the government, as the Santiago Times reported.

Protests were met with violence and repression, prompting Amnesty International to call for an investigation into reports of “an excessive use of [police] force, the unwarranted use of tear gas, the use of metal pellets and possible arbitrary arrests,” according to the BBC. Meanwhile, Chilean President Sebastián Piñera recently threatened to apply the country’s draconian anti-terrorism law toward protesters.

“By probing the links between Patagonian hydropower, electricity transmission, and the expanding mining sector, we hope to make Canadians stop and think about the implications of our shared investments abroad, and consider what obligations we might have to ensure that those investments are socially and ecologically sustainable,” states the Council of Canadians’ report.

Socially and ecologically sustainable business practices is something Canada’s mining industry has had trouble upholding.

In July 2011 Greenpeace claimed that Barrick Gold’s operations in northern Chile along the border with Argentina are responsible for the significant shrinking of three small glaciers, which farmers in the region rely on. Barrick initially wanted to remove the glaciers, but widespread opposition due to obvious environmental concerns stopped the plan. However, the Center for Human Rights and the Environment, an NGO from Argentina, reported that local water supplies have been contaminated as a result of Barrick’s local projects.

“The media in Canada is fairly silent about protests happening in Chile, unless it ties into some other big news story. I’ve talked to some reporters that have admitted that they get so many stories about mining conflict that they barely even think that it qualifies as news anymore. … It’s a great example of how cynicism promotes systemic injustice,” said Sakura Saunders, editor of ProtestBarrick.net, a website that provides research and organizing information around mining issues. The site focuses on Canadian mining giant Barrick Gold.

The Council of Canadians’ report also notes that in 2010 “five assassinations resulted from conflicts around Canadian mining developments in El Salvador, Guatemala and Mexico.” Part of the problem, the report states, is the Canadian government’s “unwillingness to hold the Canadian extractive industry to basic environmental and human rights standards in its international operations.”

A modest piece of legislation that would have empowered the federal government to investigate claims of human rights and environmental abuses and punish companies found guilty by withholding funding was rejected by Canadian legislators—even after receiving testimony that women were gang raped and tortured at a Canadian mine site in Papua New Guinea.

“We have to build a culture of resistance and awareness to these mining abuses. We have to reject these abuses in the strongest terms and demand action. We should investigate where our pensions and mutual funds are invested, and try to divest from mining companies such as Barrick and Goldcorp,” added Saunders. “We have to share the many resources out there (like videos, articles, and books) with our neighbors and friends, and not be fooled by companies’ promises for Corporate Social Responsibility.”