Earth still needs a chance
http://socialistworker.org/2010/05/10/earth-still-needs-a-chance
Erik Wallenberg explains how the 1960s environmental movement took
shape--and the lessons it offers for today's struggles.
May 10, 2010
APRIL 22, 1970, was one of the largest days of protest in U.S.
history, including a march in Washington D.C., with the slogan, "Give
Earth a Chance," taken directly from the antiwar slogan of the time,
"Give Peace a Chance."
With the passing of the 40th anniversary of Earth Day, it's no small
irony that this day might now mark a new anniversary of environmental
destruction. What's looking to become one of the largest single
ecological disasters in modern U.S. history--the explosion of BP's
deep-water oil rig and the spewing of millions of gallons of oil into
the Gulf of Mexico--only highlights how far we still have to go in
creating a world where ecological integrity is a priority.
Some 20 million people are estimated to have participated in some
action on the original Earth Day. More than 1,500 colleges held
teach-ins across the country. One action, which would seem
appropriate for today, included a group pouring oil into a reflecting
pool outside Standard Oil's headquarters in San Francisco.
Earth Day came at the end of the 1960s radicalization, but its
origins date back to the late 1950s and early '60s. In the shadow of
this latest ecological disaster, it's worth considering what gave
rise to the coordinated collective action of Earth Day. We've come a
long way since 1970, and yet in some ways, we're right back where we started.
In the 1970s, President Richard Nixon signed executive orders
creating the Environmental Protection Agency and strengthening the
Clean Air and Clean Water Acts. The 1980s and '90s gave rise to the
environmental justice movement demanding the cleanup of
environmentally destroyed urban landscapes. And last week, we
witnessed the biggest offshore oil rig disaster in a generation.
In 1969, less than a year before the original Earth Day, there was an
oil spill six miles off the coast of Santa Barbara, Calif., on a
Union Oil company rig. Photos of oil-covered beaches and wildlife
were broadcast across the country, causing outrage that sparked
attacks on Union Oil-owned gas stations and a bank with strong ties
to the company.
A group led largely by women from the Santa Barbara area started an
organization called GOO, or Get Oil Out, to advocate an end to the
practice of offshore oil drilling on their coasts.
And they won. All remaining oil rigs off the California coast in
state waters--within 200 miles of the shoreline--date from before
1969, with the exception of one. And the federal government hasn't
authorized the building of new oil rigs in waters they regulate off
the California coast--over 200 miles from the shoreline--since the 1980s.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
NOW, 40 years after the original Earth Day, in the Gulf of Mexico off
of the Louisiana coast, 11 oil rig workers are missing, now presumed
dead, and hundreds of thousands of gallons of oil continue to flow
from the sea floor into Gulf waters.
BP's negligence isn't surprising to many, but the federal
government's lack of strict and enforced regulation should be.
The long-term effects of the disaster will begin to unfold, as
hundreds of thousands of gallons of oil flow into the Gulf waters
creating a huge dead-zone. The oil washing up on shores will have ill
effects on wildlife for years to come. Further side effects will
develop as fisheries tank, taking the livelihoods of thousands of
people with them.
The Exxon Valdez disaster in Alaska provided a glimpse of the
Louisiana Gulf Coast's future. This is yet another blow to the
coastal environment and the millions of people who live here who were
just beginning to recover from the effects of Hurricane Katrina,
which included oil spills and slicks and chemicals that washed into
the bayous as a result of flooding.
All this comes within weeks of Obama taking up John McCain and Sarah
Palin's mantra of "Drill, baby, drill" in his promotion of expanding
offshore oil drilling along the East Coast, Gulf of Mexico and
Northern Alaskan Coast. The one place the administration couldn't and
wouldn't start new drilling is along the California Coast, where
public opposition remains strong.
No one should see this recent disaster as an automatic trigger to put
an end to offshore drilling. The only way there's a chance of that
happening is if activists do what thousands of others did in 1969 and
pull together to demand a change in policy, and make their voices
heard by whatever means they can muster. Those lessons are seen in
the creation of GOO, but also in another source of the activism of
the 1960s--the movement to stop to the U.S. war machine.
The connections activists made between war and environmental
destruction were key to building the environmental movement of the 1960s.
This movement was led mostly by women, and its origins can be traced
back to the anti-nuclear movement of that era. In 1961, 50,000 people
marched to Congress, calling for an end to the arms race in what was
dubbed the "Women's Strike for Peace."
The main organizer of Earth Day was a student from Washington state
who said he was inspired by the 1969 Vietnam moratorium strikes that
shut down thousands of campuses in protest against the Vietnam War.
Also in 1969, the first person in the U.S. was killed in an
environmental protest. Again, it might sound like a familiar story,
as the 40th anniversary of the killing of college students by the
National Guard at Kent State in Ohio and Jackson State in Mississippi
just passed.
In this case, the National Guard was called in to clear People's Park
in Berkeley--land owned by the university that students and community
members had turned into a park. The National Guard shot and killed a
young man who wouldn't cede the park to their development plans.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
TODAY, WE'RE sold green. We're inundated with the notion that we can
consume our way to a green future. The idea of collective action and
struggle, the core of the original Earth Day, can feel long since gone.
In 1970, the organizers of Earth Day said they intended to build a
movement. Dennis Hayes, the main student organizer, told the gathered
crowd in Washington, D.C., on the original Earth Day: "I suspect that
the politicians and businessmen who are jumping on the environmental
bandwagon don't have the slightest idea what they are getting into.
They are talking about filters on smokestacks, while we are
challenging corporate irresponsibility."
These are words we desperately need to remember today, as today's
Earth Day celebrations come sponsored by the likes of BP and Dow.
Another speaker that day went even further, stating:
We must begin to talk about the decision-making process of our
society. Pollution and the Vietnam War are symptoms of misplaced
priorities and a warped conception of human values. To many of us, it
seems that individuals have lost control over their lives, that they
are manipulated by s system with an inherent death wish rather than
one in which enhancement of life is the primary goal. The major
symbol of this death culture is the institutionalized violence
perpetrated upon people and the land by corporations such as General Electric.
However far we might be from this high point of the environmental
movement, today there are glimmers of hope.
While the UN Conference on Climate Change in Copenhagen was a failure
in terms of putting forward an agreement for cutting carbon
emissions, many individuals and groups from around the world took a
stand and exposed the lack of action and lack of democracy of the
major polluting powers.
Four months later, the World People's Conference on Climate Change
for the Rights of Mother Earth met in Tiquipaya, in Cochabamba,
Bolivia, to put forward a people's agenda, not unlike the World
Social Forum that have been organized as an alternative to the world
economic forums.
We need to rebuild an environmental movement to challenge Obama's new
energy policy and lack of environmental policy. While he promotes the
expansion of offshore oil drilling and building new nuclear power
plants, these ideas, which many believed were long-since dead, are
being branded as the new "alternative."
We would do well to learn our history and fight for a different kind
of energy future. This latest oil spill disaster should give pause to
those who argue that nuclear power is a safe alternative.
We need new energy alternatives. So instead of sending miners into
unsafe conditions to pluck coal from underground, instead of sending
oil refinery workers into dangerous waters to drain wells of oil, we
need to be fighting for new forms of safe and clean energy. More
importantly perhaps, we need to remind people that the biggest single
consumer of energy in the world is the U.S. military machine.
Building a future with new forms of alternative energy and putting an
end to U.S. imperialism are two sides of the same coin. While
corporations have invested billions of dollars into this energy
system in the form of infrastructure and extractive industries, they
have also invested heavily in the U.S. war machine.
Our fight is to challenge the whole setup of this profit driven
system. That starts with taking a stand against offshore oil drilling
now. If we can win that, we can fight for alternative energy forms,
challenge the status quo and open the door to even more alternatives
to this upside-down world.
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