A Deep Environmental Funk

Compost Pile Akron winter Feb. 23rd

I know I've been away for awhile. I've been in a funk about the fate of the earth and all the beings residing on it; and all the communities in which we live. Trying to pull myself together because Mossville needs what little help I can offer, because #AllLivesMatter which is demonstrated in the way we struggle to honor how #BlackLifeMatters. So, In honor of all life, a couple links to articles that demonstrate why I have been in "the sloth of despond". Thankfully all things, including despond, arise and pass away. 

1. Oklahoma knew in 2010 what was causing all them earthquakes:

http://bit.ly/1AILds1

2. Only Capital, and its interests seems able to stop #MountaintopRemoval coal mining.http://bit.ly/1CwfpO5

3.  The man who brought you those lite coffee capsules that are clogging the ocean has regrets.  http://bit.ly/1AISjN9

Ebola and Us

(I'm taking a minute from the Black Urban Growers Conference #BUGS2014 #Detroit for this post.  Then it's back to edible landscapes and food sovereignty!)

Ebola Virus

I've been thinking about this since August, but now that my home town, Akron, OH, has hit the spotlight with the identification of U. S. Ebola patient #3, I think it's time.

Americans are spoiled.  We inflict war and carnage, exploit resources and generally mindlessly pursue our self-interest without recognizing that we are not Fortress America, reaching out and pillaging, and then dashing back, arms full of other people's resources, to our titanium castle on a big island in the middle of a big ocean.

We were never that, and we aren't that now.  Globalization brought Christopher Columbus and deadly diseases to the naive immunes systems of the indigenous peoples of the Caribbean and North America.  The results were 80-95% of populations dying.  Disease and pestilence have been introduced to every continent from some other place because of "journeys of discovery" to find the raw materials of the emerging and consolidating capitalist economies. 

There was a point in this country when people realized that it was unsustainable to continue to pollute our water supplies with our trash and feces.  That gave rise, in part, to the public health movement in the early 20th century (they had other, less honorable intentions of course).  Public health brought sanitation, vaccines, access to clinics and infectious disease control.  In the last 20 years this commitment to public health, that eventually gave us the CDC, the surgeon general and state, county and local public health offices, has been deprived of funding and government support.  The CDC has had it's budget cut by billions over the last 20 years.  

In addition, thanks to the Reagan era health care reform, privatization has resulted in for-profit hospitals with little focus on their public health responsibilities.  And then there are states like Texas.

States like Texas, Louisiana, and West Virginia have inefficient, poorly funded or practically non-existent public health infrastructures.  They pander to extractive industries -- oil, coal, fracked gas -- that need environmental

Houston.  Thanks Juan Parras of TEJAS

and public health regulations to be held at bay so they can make their enormous profits.

So, don't show up in a Texas for-profit hospital and expect them to know where Liberia is or that Ebola is epidemic there.  And if you don't have insurance (because there is no Medicaid expansion Texas) you will be lucky to be handed a bottle of antibiotics but you will definitely be sent away.  But the nurses will try to do their best, cobbling together the protective gear inappropriately so that they will be guaranteed to be the next Ebola victims.

Disease spreads, Ebola will be here.  If you are really worried about your personal health insist your local and state governments reinvigorate the systems that guarantee our public health.

Honor the Waters Vigil, January 21, Akron OH

Japanese Lantern Ceremony Forest Hills Cemetery

Join me tomorrow to Honor the Waters Candlelight Vigil, in solidarity with the people of West Virginia and my friends at the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition.  I will be at the bottom of N. Maple St., on the Towpath Trail by the Little Cuyahoga River in Akron, OH.  Bring a candle.

When: January 21
Where: Towpath Trail, N. Maple St.
Time: 6 p.m.
Bring a candle and your favorite poem about water.



The water disaster in West Virginia could happen to any of us who depend on a river or public body of water for our water supply.  Some version of it is probably happening every day to those of us who live near fracking, coal mining, oil refining, and chemical processing.  Oops, that would be almost all of us.

Martin Luther King Day In A Time of Environmental Crisis

By way of Langston Hughes (http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15722):


The Negro Speaks of Rivers

I've known rivers: I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins. My soul has grown deep like the rivers. I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young. I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep. I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it. I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset. I've known rivers: Ancient, dusky rivers. My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

Edgar J. Mouton, MEAN Co-Founder, Passes at 76

Mr. Edgar Mouton speaking to Sarah Lawrence College Health Advocacy Students

I have been reluctant to write this post.  Death, of course, is a part of that wheel of stress we trudge, and old men die all the time.  So that's not the issue. Black men die of unnatural causes with disturbing frequency, as this blog has sometimes documented.  To live to be 76 can be a blessing.  But Mr. Mouton was not an ordinary man and his death probably not natural.

Edgar Mouton, co-founder of Mossville Environmental Action Now, passed away last Thursday.  He was 76 years old. I only knew Mr. Mouton for four years. I met him post-Katrina (how I still count time in Louisiana) in my role as a trainer with the Environmental Support Center (also of happy memory).  He had worked in the refinery zone in a number of different plants.  I remember him telling me he had handled benzine and sulphuric acid.  His age was a mystery to me as exposure to all those chemicals brings illnesses and conditions that wear a body away.  Mr. Mouton had dedicated 30 years of his life to revealing the injustice of favoring the interests of industry over humanity.  The people of Mossville were being sacrificed to our consumption and the profits of the oil and chemical industries.  He worked tirelessly to hold them accountable, for federal Superfund designation for the land, owned by black folk since the end of the Civil War (another way to count time), now lost to pollution and to reclaim the health of his people.  

Like most of the people I have had the privilege to work with in Mossville, Mr. Mouton had a mordant sense of humor and infinite patience.  One of my last memories is of him, Dorothy Felix (MEAN's other co-founder), Wilma Subra and Sanjay Gupta of CNN being stood up by the head of the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality.  It was spring, it was hot, they wouldn't let these two elderly people into the state office building in Baton Rouge.  (I suppose the CNN cameraman was a problem for them). They were standing around cracking jokes.  They knew that in some fundamental way, LADEQ had already lost the war.


Goodbye Mr. Mouton.  I'm happy to know you have joined the ancestors in a high, and much less toxic, place.

Environmental Justice News and Actions

I'm back in Ohio looking forward to a summer of writing, tweaking my History of Health Care course for the Sarah Lawrence College Health Advocacy Program and clearing vast amounts of undergrowth in my woods (my woods! I hadn't thought about it this way until now) as construction continues on my land.  I will also be tracking EJ developments. 

Potential Fracking Areas in OH (ecowatch.org)

As many of you know, Ohio passed one of the most regressive pieces of environmental legislation in it's recent worst in the country Fracking law, allowing health and safety loopholes, the gas industry will pay very little and, according to EcoWatch.org "Doctors will be prevented from talking openly about the sickness they see in their patients, and the gas industry will keep profits flowing out of our communities."

Marie Gunnoe Contemplates A Mountaintop Removal Site (ohvec.org)

Mountaintop Removal is the topic at the Natural Resources  Committee of the House of Representatives.  OVEC's Marie Gunnoe is testifying before a rather hostile Republican committee.  This is in anticipation of the upcoming End Mountaintop Removal Week in DC.  Be prepared to call your Senators and Representatives on June 6. 

The Kelly Air Base Struggle: Building A Grassroots Movement Against Military Pollution

I have the privilege to attend the Environmental Justice Encuentro in Houston, sponsored by TEJAS Barrios.  The connection between environmental justice and health is abundantly evident.  Hearing from the Southwest Workers Union and their community campaign in San Antonio TX to close Kelly Air Force Base and have the shallow aquifer, poisoned by TCE (tri-chloroethylene) and PCE (a related chemical),  underneath cleaned up.

Purple Cross Campaign

Here's an awful fact: One out of two households in near Kelly have someone who died from cancer.  These victims of the toxic soup in the aquifer ten feet below their homes are commemorated through the Purple Cross Campaign. The whole campaign for closing, cleaning up and addressing the health effects of military pollution has been based on a popular methodology that the organizers from SWU describe as "We Speak For Ourselves".

San Antonio residents believe the aquifer has been accumulating military toxins since the 1950s.  They have been documenting health effects and organizing for change since the early 1990s.

The Lorax Sells Mazda's in DC

Thanks Bionic Mama for sharing this story about the Lorax selling what "everyone, everyone, everyone needs:"

Mister!  …he said with a sawdusty sneeze,

The Lorax Selling Mazdas

I am the Lorax. I speak for the trees.

 

I speak for the trees, for the trees have no tongues.

And I'm asking you, sir, at the top of my lungs

 

 He was very upset as he shouted and puffed--

"Whats that THING you've made out of my Truffula tuft?

 

Apparently, a Mazda.

The Lorax

When I was in high school ("it all started way back, such a long, long time back...") my classmates and I made a movie for advanced placement English.  It was the Lorax.  We filmed on the vast lawn at Joanne Presper's house.  We used their riding mower for a Truffula tree cutter.  Some of us were Truffula trees.  (one of us came close to losing a limb to the tree cutter).  The Lorax is in the top ten of books I would read to my campers.  

"At the far end of town, where the Grickle-grass grows
and the wind smells, slow-and-sour when it blows

and no birds ever sing, excepting old crows...
is the Street that a creature named the Lorax knows

It is here, deep in the Grickle-grass, some people say,
Where you’ll discover you can still see, today,

where the Lorax once stood
just as long as it could
before somebody lifted the Lorax away."

 And like a good future poet I had memorized it:

"I am the Lorax, I speak for the trees. I speak for the trees for the trees have no tongues..."

I love that book so I won't be seeing the movie.  I take A. O. Scott on his word that it is "a noisy, useless piece of junk."  

Beaver Creek, Tipton, Tennessee

Today's environmental justice movement is very much like the Lorax, it speaks for those whose voices are ignored.  We have to take control of the narrative of what is being done to all our communities but especially low-income and communities of color in the face of oil spills, mountain top removal, illegal dumping and fracking.  

We must be the Lorax, and speak for our peeps, who are sickening and dying as quick as the trees.

US Toxics and Human Rights

An extraordinary event kicks off in New Orleans this morning. Representatives of the International Indian Treaty Council, including representatives of Alaskan peoples affected by oil pipelines, and Advocates for Environmental Human Rights, are convening a US Toxics Policies and Human Rights Forum. They will gather in New Orleans, travel to Mossville to tour the community with Mossville Environmental Action Now leaders Dorothy Felix, Delmar Bennett and Van Johnson, and then return to New Orleans for further discussions. The meeting announcement provided by the Gulf Coast Fund states, "A gathering of diverse organizations to share, learn, and strategize about current US policy reform initiatives, community organizing, and advocacy to protect reproductive health, prevent toxic exposures, and defend our basic human rights."

The Change We Want To Be: Groups to Watch and Support in 2011

 Southeast Asian Queers United for Empowerment and Leadership (seaQuel), A Project of
Providence Youth Student Movement (PrYSM)

There are a few social change and environmental justice organizations that I'm especially fond of, groups doing good work at a very grassroots level.  First, an organization that isn't exactly grassroots but one I've known and loved for almost 20 years.  The Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice has always been my model for what a women's fund should be.  Innovative, daring, playful and bold.  Astraea now funds the social change efforts of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgendered Queer persons all over the world, in places where it's too dangerous to publicize that GLBTQ organizing is happening.  Organizing more fundamental than military service and marriage.

Now, those grassroots groups:
New on the scene, but organizing in the tradition of CEW, is Women Encouraging Empowerment Inc (WEEI).  Organizing with immigrant refugee and low income women of color in Boston and the North Shore, they are so new that they don't yet have a website.  Fatou Fatty is their Executive Director.  You can communicate with them at Women Encouraging Empowerment Inc., 349 Broadway Suite 100, Revere, MA 02151.

Working hard to counteract the effects of mountain top removal, among other environmental disasters being perpetrated by coal and other extractive industries is the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition. OVEC has a comprehensive vision for how environmental justice can be attained in West Virginia, including grassroots organizing, election reform and environmental monitoring. 

Stan Johnson & I offering technical assistance
at a LA Bucket Brigade Event

Supporting the efforts of grassroots environmental justice organizations throughout the South and Southwest is The Environmental Support Center.  Offering ongoing, hands on technology, organizational and technical skills training and grants of new computers, video cameras and software, ESC helps guarantee the low-income EJ community has the tools essential to documenting abuses by the myriad extractive industries polluting working class and communities of color.


Now these are just a few of my favorites.  You know there are similar groups where you live.  Search them out or consult trustworthy intermediaries and funders such as Astraea and ESC to help guarantee innovative grassroots social change and environmental justice  organizations in your area are receiving the attention and support that will help them be the change we want to be.

Getting to Know Calcasieu Parish Louisiana Law Enforcement

I promised the administration at Sarah Lawrence College I wouldn't write about this until all the students were safely back home.  That promise will show the difference between how an environmental justice organization thinks about the events I am about to describe and a college with its multiple concerns about student safety, public image and recruitment, not to mention the high cost of bails bondsmen these days (that's a joke, SLC!).

On the evening of March 23rd I left the students to finish up at the base we had established at Mt. Zion Baptist Church.  I went in a desperate (and fruitless) search for a washateria.   I had seen a laundry facility with that name in Moss Bluff near our accommodations at the St. Charles Retreat Center.  Have you heard the song Down in Mississippi on the No Turning Back CD by Mavis Staples?  She describes integrating a washateria.  I wanted a photo of the lit up sign and I wanted clean underwear.

By the time I got there the washateria last load time limit had passed.  So then  crankiness arose, especially as I discovered that all local laundry facilities closed quite early.  That crankiness was dispelled when I received a panicked phone call from my students.  They had taken the scenic route -- along PPG Drive that runs between the mostly abandoned Bel Air neighborhood and the CONOCO refinery.  The area wells had been poisoned by a toxic plume from the refinery into the ground water supply.  The Health Advocacy students had interviewed the few remaining residents who were holding out for a fair relocation settlement from the refineries.  They had stopped to take photos of the refinery at night.

Illuminated by the otherworldly  yellow glow of thousands of sodium vapor lamps, the Calcasieu Parish refinery district after sunset feels like our worst dystopian nightmare.  I suspect that this  part of the county is visible at night even from the space shuttle since refinery district is so large and the sodium lamps so bright.  But given that reality their are those in the county who prefer the refineries not be photographed, starting with refinery management.

As the students traveled away from the refinery and towards their humble retreat center accommodations they realized they were being followed.  It was pretty obvious.  The car in pursuit was a red Malibu with rims.  Big shiny spinney silver rims.  It tailgated and pulled up along side.  It pulled in front and tried to slow them down.

They called me during what was an understandably frightening experience.  They finally seemed to have managed to shake the Malibu.  I abandoned my search for a laundromat and met them at a Sonic Drive In about 2 miles from the turn off for the retreat center.  We didn't want the red Malibu to know where we were staying.

The students described what had happened as we were parked in the Sonic parking lot.  I was standing between their two cars.  We were just deciding to order some delicious cheese tots when a police car pulled up, then another, then two more.  The students were instructed to stay in the van.  I handed them my cell phone. 

The first cop was belligerent, demanded to see the camera and threatened us with violating Homeland Security laws.  It's illegal to photograph the refinery at night.  Could blow a hole the size of Texas if it was attacked.  What were we doing?

I politely refused his demand for the camera.  Another car pulled up.  The supervisor.  After more questioning it became clear they had nothing to charge us on.  They asked to see the photos.  I consented.  The first seven were the worst night shots ever taken.  He laughed. 

I am not sure if they ever filed a report of suspicious activity or turned our names into the Dept. of Homeland Security.  I am beginning to doubt it since they never called SLC to inquire into the reality of our existence.

The sheriff asked me if I wanted him to check the students' i.d.'s individually or as a group.  I chose as a group.  They asked for all the badge numbers and the supervisor's name.  They complained about being followed.  The sheriff assured them he would check it out.

As we left the Sonic we saw, on the other side of the parking lot,  the occupants of the red Malibu watching us pull away.

Tomorrow: What we learned from our encounter with the sheriffs.