Life in Louisiana, and on Earth, Struggles to Survive

Published on Wednesday, April 20, 2011 by New. Clear. Vision.
Life in Louisiana, and on Earth, Struggles to Survive
by John Clark

On this anniversary of the largest accidental marine oil spill in history, attention here in south Louisiana is focused on the consequences of that traumatic event. As the Deepwater Horizon disaster begins to recede into history, we have heard wildly divergent views of what its effects have been for our region.

On the one hand, we hear optimistic statements about the almost complete recovery of the Gulf. On the other, we hear troubling reports of what still lies beneath the surface, and of possible long-term ecological damage that can only be assessed after much careful scientific study. Meanwhile, tourist agencies and public officials urge us to relax, take a swim, and eat some seafood.

I suggest that in assessing the real costs of oil, we take a larger view of the matter.  What are its costs over the long term for this region, for humanity, and for the whole planet?

My family came to New Orleans almost three hundred years ago.  Over the centuries that we have been here, we have lived in a culture that has been shaped by the bodies of water that surround us: by the Gulf, the lakes, the bayous, the wetlands, and by the great river that created our landscape, the very ground on which we stand.

We might reflect for a moment on our local and regional history over that period, and on a much larger history of which we are a part. If we go back a century and a half, we find a Louisiana that was rich and powerful. Its power came from an economy based on cotton, sugar cane and slavery. This economy brought poverty and oppression to many, but wealth and prosperity to the rulers and the more privileged. It was also an economy that was doomed to extinction.

On the eve of the Civil War, the great geographer Reclus could observe that according to the conventional wisdom of the American South, this system of production “was not only a necessary and inexorable institution, but also a moral and humane one, producing the greatest political and social advantages.” Just as the economic system based on cotton, sugar cane, and slavery was about to collapse, and the entire old society with it, there was an almost universal outcry among those who could speak and be heard that that system was inevitable and eternal, that our society depended on it, and that without it there would be catastrophe. But this system was itself the catastrophe.

Since the recent dawn of the Petroleum Age, Louisiana has produced nearly twenty billion barrels of oil, generating enormous wealth for the national and global economies. Once again, the conventional wisdom has seen the prevailing economic order as both absolutely necessary and highly advantageous. But what, in reality, have the dominant extractive and petrochemical industries, and especially oil, brought to Louisiana? We are one of the poorest states. We are one of the least educated states. We are one of the unhealthiest states. We are one of the states in which government is most abjectly subservient to industry. We are one of the states most scarred by rampant corruption. We are one of the most environmentally devastated states.  And now, the oil industry has damaged coastal wetlands and Gulf ecosystems, quite possibly for a considerable period into the future, in the worst marine oil disaster in history.

But these are far from the greatest evils that have been inflicted on us by petro-tyranny. Thanks largely to the operations of the oil industry, two thousand square miles of our coastal wetlands have disappeared.  Communities whose lives have been dependent on these wetlands and on the Gulf for hundreds or, in the case of indigenous people, even thousands of years, are disappearing.  Finally, and most disastrously, global climate change caused by a carbon-based, and above all, a petroleum-based economy, will soon submerge coastal Louisiana entirely. Our home, our native land, will disappear forever.

We are not unique victims of such petro-terrorism. We might also ask what the oil industry has brought to humanity as a whole, and to the planet. Oil has fueled a powerful system of production, which, while creating massive amounts of material goods, has also been essential to creating the Sixth Great Mass Extinction in the three-billion-year history of life on earth. This is the great catastrophe of our age. It is, indeed, the single most important fact about life on earth at the present moment, and the single most traumatic one, which is why it is almost never mentioned in electoral campaigns, news reports, or textbooks.

Oil has also brought us global climate change that threatens to inundate not only our region, but lands where hundreds of millions of people live. It threatens to create a disaster for global agriculture, thus contributing to the possibility of a catastrophic population crash.  It threatens to aggravate species and ecosystem destruction, and thus accelerate the existing biodiversity crisis. This massive climate disruption is the second greatest catastrophe of our age, one which is now much discussed, but almost never faced as if it were a real, impending reality.

If we take an only slightly larger view of history than is customary, we will realize an obvious truth. Oil will end, and it will end very soon. The petroleum economy will decline, and it will do so in this century. The Petroleum Age will have existed for only a brief moment in human history, no more than a fleeting nanosecond in earth’s history.  The great question is how much social and ecological havoc it will wreak before it disappears.

The tragic irony is that we have the technological means to create abundance for all without the massive ecological devastation caused by fossil fuels (and other destructive technologies).  A large part of our challenge today, on the one-year anniversary of the worst marine oil disaster in history, is to learn to assess both the costs and benefits of oil in relation to something much greater: the value of the healthy flourishing of life on earth.
New. Clear. Vision. © 2010 - 2011
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/04/20-7

A most important matter

Dear Friends,

God, what a summer. Federal scientists have concluded that we've just come through the warmest six months, the warmest year, and the warmest decade in human history. Nineteen nations have set new all-time temperature records; the mercury in Pakistan reached 129 degrees, the hottest temperature ever seen in Asia. And there's nothing abstract about those numbers, not with Moscow choking on smoke from its epic heat wave and fires, not with Pakistan half washed away from its unprecedented flooding.

But that's just the half of it. It's also the summer when the U.S. Senate decided to keep intact its 20-year bipartisan record of doing nothing about global warming. Global warming is no act of God. We're up against the most profitable and powerful industries on earth: the companies racking up record profits from fossil fuels. And we're not going to beat them by asking nicely. We're going to have to build a movement, a movement much bigger than anything we've built before, a movement that can push aback against the financial power of Big Oil and Big Coal. That movement is our only real hope, and we need your help to plot its future.

We've got some immediate and crucial priorities. For instance, groups around the world are joining together on 10/10/10 for a Global Work Party, demonstrating that we already know many of the solutions to the climate crisis. That will be a good day not just to put up solar panels, but also to shame our political leaders, to say to them, "We're getting to work. What about you?" Meanwhile, around the country, lawyers and community groups are doing yeoman's work fighting off new coal plants, activists are persuading banks to stop loaning to corporate villains, city councils are figuring out how to make their towns more efficient and resilient. This is the basic work of any movement, the foundation on which hope for long-term progress rests.

But necessary as such efforts are, they're not sufficient. We're making progress, but not as fast as the physical situation is deteriorating. Time is not on our side, so we've concluded that going forward massdirect action must play a bigger role in this movement, as it eventually did in the suffrage movement, the civil-rights movement, and the fight against corporate globalization. Even now, environmentalists in places like the coalfields of Appalachia have been putting these tactics to good use, albeit in small ways. (In the spring of 2009, our three groups worked with others to pull off a large-scale action outside the congressional power plant in D.C. that resulted in a promise that it would cease to burn coal.)  History suggests, in other words, that one way to effectively communicate both to the general public and to our leaders the urgency of the crisis is to put our bodies on the line.

Nobody can predict which one event will trigger social change. Paul Revere was not the only rider to warn of the British advance, and many people refused to move to the back of the bus before Rosa Parks. But we do know two things. First, that we must act with unity, and second, many minds working together are likely to be smarter. So we're asking for your help. As you go about your other work on behalf of the planet and its diverse communities, think about the possibilities for direct action, and write them down and send them to us. Here are a few thoughts to guide you.

• Our actions must be infused with the spirit of Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and other peaceful protesters before us. No violence, no property damage.
• We need large actions, with many members of the general public. Think hundreds and thousands. So don't concentrate on the kind of tactics that only a few hardy specialists can carry out; we're not going to have hundreds of people rappelling or scuba diving.
• We don't think for a minute that we can actually physically shut down the fossil-fuel economy for any meaningful period; it's too big. We need to aim for effective symbolic targets -- say, dirty, old coal-fired power plants -- and use them to make clear the need and opportunity to cut carbon fast.
• Our actions must be rooted in the communities where they are held and be organized hand in hand with local groups and activists.
• Our tactics need to engage onlookers, not alienate them. We have to have effective ways of keeping provocateurs and incendiaries at a distance, and attracting the kind of people who actually influence the rest of the public. Discipline will matter.
• We need to be transparent and open in our planning, not reliant on secrecy. We'll need to do our work certain that law enforcement is looking over our shoulders; our method can't be surprise.
• Beauty counts. We're fighting for the beauty in the world that's being stolen by our adversaries, and at the same time we're aiming for hearts and minds.
• We don't have unlimited resources. The cost and complexity of these kinds of actions can mount quickly. As with all things environmental, frugality and simplicity are virtues.

Note that though all of our groups have international operations, we're only thinking about America right now. That's for three reasons. One, in some parts of the world activists have already done great work that can teach us a lot. Two, America really has to show some leadership, since we're historically the biggest cause of climate change. And three, though we Americans face real and sobering risks when we engage in direct action, people doing the same things in many other nations can be locked up for decades or worse; in those places, other tactics will have to suffice.

Note too that though this letter comes from just three environmental groups, we want this fight open to everyone. We'll happily work with any organization that shares our goals and tactics as plans go forward; in fact, we think that breaking down boundaries between groups is key to any chance at success. We'll do our best to reach out, but please make sure you let us know you want to be involved.

We've set up a special email address for ideas: climate.ideas@gmail.com. By late autumn, we hope we'll have been able to mine those ideas and start coming up with coherent plans for actions starting next spring.

We know this strategy won't appeal to all of you. That's fine; there are a thousand other useful ways to help, and we don't want to distract anyone from other work they're doing. But if you have ideas, send them in. It's clear to us that this is going to be a battle for the long haul, and we're going to need to be creative and committed. Thanks much for being a big part of it.

Phil Radford, Greenpeace USA
Becky Tarbotton, Rainforest Action Network
Bill McKibben, 350.org

From the Wire

Yesterday during a presentation at the state capitol related to a bill to reduce carbon emissions and the number of miles vehicles in Minnesota are driven, Sen. Julianne Ortman, R-Chanhassen, grew incredulous and asked, "Mr. Chair, are we still in America? ... I find that to be very offensive, an insult to every person who drives a car. I guess it insults me because I drove to the Capitol alone today. I find that very insulting."
Ortman was referring to an image from the cover of a 2002 book by the comedian Bill Maher, which was titled, "When You Ride Alone, You Ride with bin Laden: What the Government Should Be Telling Us to Help Fight the War on Terrorism."



Oh boy, this pushes all my buttons.

Prof Marshall raises a salient and important point of debate, one that is almost never talked about, but he fails miserably to demonstrate any strength in his conviction, and turns into such an obsequious little toady at the feet of a fat-ass Pol. The way he caves to her mock outrage is embarrassing and probably served to defeat his argument before he even got started.

Should we be surprised at Senator Fat-Ass's hissy fit? No, not at all. It seems nothing has changed from Bushie's 'Murika: " Tell us what we want to hear, not what the research shows, or your considered professional opinion." It would seem also that Senator Fatt-Ass is sticking to the playbook of keeping people as much in the dark as possible concerning the fact that the country is prosecuting wars of Imperial design. killing thousands, displacing millions, burning billions of gallons of oil and spending trillions of dollars in the process.

But is anyone asking what kind of carbon footprint the big green killing machine leaves behind?

This mock outrage is no great surprise, and in line with a significant and telling moment when the new Great Imperial Leader in his first speech said, "We will not apologize for our way of life." So as long as we 'Murikans can continue to consume and waste the majority of the world's resources and human capital, as long as the world continues to subsidize our cheap gas and our "non-negotiable way of life", then all is right with the world.

Why is it so offensive to suggest that it is unsustainable and the height of selfishness to drag around three empty seats and a ton and a half of metal on your daily travels through "Errandsville"?

So why is it so offensive to be even beyond rational discussion in a Senate hearing, that, god forbid, people might have to share a commute? People seem ready to embrace change, so long as it doesn't affect them personally.

+++

Whenever I have to stand and wait at a bus stop, or even waiting at red lights, I tend to count cars. Excluding all commercial vehicles, trucks and transit, I count only private autos, to see whether or not there is a passenger.

Typically, here is what I see.

On weekends it averages about 1:1, 50% of cars are single occupant. Midweek, midday, its about 3:1, 75%. Rushhour ramps up to 4:1 or more, typically 80-90% of cars carry one fat ass and three empty seats.

This is what is truly offensive.

Your Choice

“Climate change” has placed all humankind before a great choice: to continue in the ways of capitalism and death, or to start down the path of harmony with nature and respect for life.

--Evo Morales

Please read the full article.