Dams, Bio-fuel, and Murder: Progress for Whom?

"Brazil, after a long battle, approves a dam."

Not too long ago, after reading a title like that (courtesy of the NYT), I'd wonder who the fools are that would oppose a dam. Jobs, opportunity, energy, water flow. Progress. These are things that the poor villagers need, surely...

But lately I've started asking who is it who benefits from such "progress".

Opponents said they would not give up the fight against the Belo Monte dam, which they said would flood a large part of the Xingu River basin, affecting local fishing and forcing tens of thousands of indigenous people from their native lands. 

“We will not cede an inch,” said Antônia Melo, the coordinator of Xingu Vivo Para Sempre, a group based in Altamira, a city that will be partly flooded. “Our indignation and our strength to fight only increases with every mistake and every lie of this government.”

Progress is yet another code word. Another sign of Newspeak.

We are protecting you. We are giving you access to fresh and healthy water and/or food and energy as well giving you jobs and equity and teaching you lazy leechers about responsibility.

But then you start questioning whether or not they truly need what they are being sold. And certainly for such a high cost.

The price of free capitalism, I suppose?

Q'eqchi' peasants mourning the assassinations of three young activists.

On March 15, 2011, Guatemalan police, soldiers and paramilitaries began a series of violent evictions targeting Q’eqchi’ peasant communities in Panzos, Alta Verapaz. The purpose of the evictions were to stop the production of basic grains and convert the land to sugar cane and African palm for the production of biofuel. Hundreds of homes were destroyed, several people were killed in the attacks, and thousands lost their only source of food and income...

Helicopters fly overhead with armed men leaning out the door pointing guns at peasants below. Masked paramilitaries attack communities at night. Murderers remain free and community leaders are arrested on fraudulent charges. Hundreds of families have had their houses and crops burned to the ground, leaving them with hunger and a desperate struggle for survival...

The Guatemala Solidarity Project (GSP) strongly condemns continued repression against 14 q’eqchi’ communities in Panzos which were violently evicted in March by the Guatemalan government and biofuel corporations...

Thousands of q’eqchi’ peasants near Livingston, Guatemala had been anticipating February 14, 2011 as a possible day of joy and celebration. Instead it became a day of unbearable grief after the bodies of three missing leaders affiliated with Encuentro Campesino (Peasant Encounter) were found floating in a lake near Livingston, covered with bullet wounds.

Encuentro Campesino is a peasant and indigenous rights organization which political prisoner Ramiro Choc helped form. February 14 was the first day that Choc became eligible for release from prison, and the three were expected to participate in activities to pressure for his freedom.

...
But who cares, right? I mean, we're talking about access to bio-fuel, right? We're gonna need that sh*t soon because we're approaching peak oil, right? Ain''t it better than dirty dino-based oil? And won't the production of it (and the dam) give good jobs to the economically devastated people of Guatemala and Brazil?

These are what we tell ourselves. I know that I've been conditioned to believe such quandaries. But the truth is actually not that complicated. We need to ask other questions:

• Why are a people who live in such a bio-rich environment considered poor?
• Do they actually need jobs - or do they already have them? 
• And not only jobs, but meaningful ones - ones that give them a sense of accomplishment and meaning?

Going back to Brazil:

Conservationists have become increasingly critical of Brazil’s efforts to protect the Amazon rain forest. Brazil’s deforestation numbers increased sharply over the past nine months, and the lower house of Congress last week approved a revision of the Forest Code that would open up protected areas to deforestation while granting amnesty to agribusiness developers for previous forest-clearing. The Senate has yet to vote on the measure. 

“The government has an important choice — to go back to a future of wasteful publicly funded mega-projects and frontier chaos, or ahead, to the future of a sustainable and equitable green economy leader, with rule of law, good governance and a secure natural and investment environment,” said Stephan Schwartzman of the Environmental Defense Fund. 

The $17 billion dam, which is expected to start producing electricity in 2015, would divert the Xingu River along a 62-mile stretch in Pará State. Environmental groups say it will flood more than 120,000 acres of rain forest and settlements, displacing 20,000 to 40,000 people and releasing large quantities of methane. The Ibama spokeswoman put the number of displaced people at 20,000 but insisted that no indigenous people would be removed from their lands.

There is a way out, a holistic change, a solution for all of this mess. It's living local, local sustainability. The idea is tied into a phrase attributed to Gandhi, "There is enough for everyone's need. But not enough for everyone's greed."

We don't need so much energy. We don't need to starve many while several gorge ourselves on fats. We just need to live within our means and share properly.

In the meantime, please support and spread the word about the Belo Monte dam project's destruction and the Guatemala Solidarity Project, as well as the people whose lives will be affected by these traps.

Eating Local - The Necessity

From Chef Gaston D. Merideth:

Chicken today contains 266 percent more fat than it did 40 years ago.

What’s more, today’s chicken also has 33 percent less protein, according to a study from the Institute of Brain Chemistry and Human Nutrition at London Mejtropolitan University. The problem is modern farming practices. Cramped environments and unnatural diets produce birds that have the same weight problems as the humans who eat them

University of Washington researchers calculated the cost discrepancy between healthy food and junk foods and found that 2,000 calories of junk food rings up at a measly $3.52 a day. Yet for 2,000 calories of nutritious grub, the researchers plunked down $36. To add insult to fiscal injury, out of every dollar you spend on food, only 19 cents goes toward the stuff you eat. The other 81 percent goes toward marketing, manufacturing, and packaging. Think about that the next time your grocery bill jumps into triple-digit dollars.

Image courtesy of Earth Song

Let's face facts, we're talking a lot about food these days. Food safety. Food desserts. Natural foods. Whole foods. Organic foods. Processed, frozen and thawed, unrecognizable food. Food shortages. Food security. Food democracy.

But the corporatization of our food supply leaves us less in touch with not only what we are eating, but our role in this planet and our identities as people.

And there's no shortage of talk about this phenomenon. Which is good. We need to have this conversation because nearly every other voice surrounding us in telling us that what and how we are eating is fine and great and can't really be changed even if we desired it to be (which we would never do, we're told).

Movies like Food, Inc., King Corn, The Economics of Happiness (highly recommended for this series), Super Size Me, and books like The Carnivore's Dilemma and Fast Food Nation have caused us to begin talking about doing something different.

Because, in case you missed the intro, Chicken contains 266 percent more fat than it did 40 years ago.

That's nearly three times as fat as in the early 70's. Not because the chicken has evolved and can handle all the extra weight. In fact, if you've watched any of those movies, you know that they can't. They can't stand up or move around. Their breasts are too heavy for their own body to support. So they're immobile. Which means that they are not healthy. And they get diseases. And those diseases are treated with all sorts of vaccines which is not helping to protect us from super-bugs - and putting more poison in our and our children's bloodstream.

Add to this that the blood and waste from dying (or slaughtered) and rotting chickens, pigs, cows, etc. is going directly to our water streams and affecting the down-hill vegetation, including spinach, peanuts, soy, oats... (Do any of these food groups sound familiar? What if we add in the word "salmonella"?)

And then there's that extra crap that goes into our food when it's being processed. The flavor of our natural orange juice - the ones that come in that carton which we associate with milk and farms and innocent childhoods, for example, is completely artificial - the work of chemists. Filler is made from wood chips. Pesticides were designed from as methods of warfare. Genetic modification means that - at the least - companies are owning copyrights on shared grains.

Steroids are killing cows and causing our children to develop too fast. Carcinogens can be traced back from rain water, pesticides, genetic modifications, bleachings and other treatments, storage, shipment, transportation, manufacturing, and processing.

Add to these factors the fact that those who sow, reap, pluck, gather our foods often, ironically, go hungry themselves as they work for nearly slave wages and are themselves distanced from the very bountiful harvest their hands touch... Those who pull roots from the ground cannot keep enough potatoes on their tables.

Our disconnect from our food reaps violence. Because we've so centralized our food system, only those with money have true access to the best of foods (and water). Most of us are stuck with modified, highly processed, bleached/frozen/de-nutritioned foods. That is, if we have access at all...

What we need is regain control, to establish a food democracy.

Photo from Interesting Green

As we noted last week, we cannot afford to maintain flying apples around the world from their place of origin, to a factory to be wrapped up in prettifying plastic, to the stores where they will be consumed. We must grow our own.

We cannot afford to remain in the left-right paradigm. We cannot afford to grow and consume and exploit at the rates we are.

I propose that we begin a new way of living. Let us call it: Radical Progressive Conservativism.

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The movement toward localism - in any of its forms, really - seems to me to be a long one. One that must be grassroots and organic. One that must start with a few and one that must release from the cold, iron grips of oppression over a generation or even more before being realized. Although there are signs of progress (the World Bank and IMF have been pushed out of South America and much of Asia), there are still troubling signs that the powerful elite will not go without a few bloody fights, without gasping their last.

What, in the meantime, can we do to begin to live out the existence of this free and localized manner. How do we break the bonds of slavery to the large banks - as we are being asked to do by our brothers and sisters suffering for the struggle in New York and Greece right now?

I will take your suggestions and add them to mine come Wednesday. Practical ways to begin living local even as we dream of much larger ways of restructuring society.

Local Energy

I'm writing much of this content as I mass transit from the north side of Chicago to the far south side. Four days a week, I take two trains and a bus to get to work for roughly an hour and a half each way. About a third of that time is spent standing and waiting for the next bus or train, specifically if I don't leave during rush hour times. Time on the vehicles is spent standing, sitting, reading, writing, filling out (and being frustrated at) Sudoku puzzles, staring blankly off into space. Texting, calling, checking Facebook on my not-quite-smart phone. Closing my eyes and nodding off for five minute intervals.

I'm surrounded by a few hundred men and women and youth who are in similar predicaments - few traveling as far as me, but most traveling miles upon miles upon miles. And yet, outside of biking or walking, we are taking the most fuel-efficient mode to our far-flung jobs.

Now, notice I didn't say it is an energy-efficient mode. That's because it doesn't seem to save much energy over using a fuel-efficient car* - although trains in particular use electricity, so they don't use up the oil supply.

Working so far from our homes is just not sustainable for a multitude of reasons:

• The tremendous toll on our environment, 
• The cost of our health as a result of environmental hazards as well as so much immobility
• The limited supply of oil
• The depleting nature of coal
• The devastating usage of nuclear power
• The evisceration of families
• The amount of financial resources used by poor families
• Time wastage

The connections between these (and other) factors has huge implications in terms of overall health of planet, body (sitting around for so long can do things to ya), soul, community. We are disembodied from our selves and our homes.

But even all transit is just one part of a larger, completely messed-up way of approaching life that enriches the globalization forces (multi-national corps) and depletes the rest of us.

We fly apples from South America where they're grown to Asia where they're packed in plastic and then to North America where they're consumed. We spend several hours a day standing or driving in lines, wasting time and gas, to go to those grocery stores where we buy pre-packaged, highly processed and rarely, actually fresh foods and drinks (if we can call them that) that are made using tons and tons of non-renewable energy. Our televisions and computers and other toys that we use to distract us from the mendacity and meaninglessness of our days are also produced from and by massive, massive quantities of energy. Not to mention our clothes. All of which are, of course, manufactured in different countries - sometimes piecemeal - and shipped thousands upon thousands of miles to ports which take them on freight trains and then on .

Lack of adequate weather-proofing means that we use even more power.

And then there's the razing and destroying of old property to make way for new property - both of which use (waste) tremendous energy.

And how are these things powered? Dangerous coal, nuclear power, and oil.

Need we remind anybody of the toxic danger of oil?

To live locally is to reduce the waste in air, water, land pollution that is killing our children, that is making us unhealthier as it is also damaging our food supply. Simply having better fuel economy, although it is a step in the right direction, is not nearly enough. We need to rethink how we live and the space in which we live.

Which is to say, we need to begin the process of living locally as organic grassroot communities.

Dare to dream with me. What can we become if we live and commute locally?

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*Buses are only more fuel efficient than cars when the car is single-passenger. And then only by 20%.

Chicago Tuesdays: Hey! I'm WALKIN' Here!

One of the sites where I work is in the middle of an industrial park. As a motorist, for a few months I used to travel through here between work, church and school. And I appreciated this strip, because it is nearly half a mile of pure, unadulterated three lanes in an otherwise stop light-heavy major thoroughfare. If you hit the green at the south end, you've got another six blocks before the next light - but that's full of dangerous turns and it's more narrow, so it's not quite the joy to traverse.

So I see why cars don't necessarily have any desire to slow down at this juncture, despite the obvious pedestrian crossing markers on the floor.

However, Illinois just became the fifth state to pass a law wherein cars have to stop in order to let pedestrians cross at any crossing lane. And that would include unmarked lanes.

Motorists don't seem to be much aware of this law, though. And I'm sure that there are many who, when first hearing about the law, argue that it's unnecessary or reaching For instance, although 6,000 people are hit by cars each year, only a fraction of those result in injuries and fatalities. I can hear the everyman rhetoric right now. "Only 170 people died in the entire state from getting hit by cars while walking. Half of them were probably asking for it. How much are we going to lose in revenue to enforce this law? How much productivity are we going to lose to slow down every block for walkers?"

Similar arguments (at a more heightened and frightening level) were made about DWI laws, of course. But there is a major difference: Driving while intoxicated has killed multitudinous drivers, passengers, passerby, bicyclists and other motorists and their passengers. The culture-change that needed to happen there was not just necessary, but apparently so. And as Mad mothers started telling their stories, more people felt it necessary to be responsible (not always, but there is a legitimate sea change here).

Pedestrian crossing laws and cultural shifts are, however, just as necessary, even if not as apparently so. Citizens are not necessarily dying at a heart-breaking rate from being run over or sideswiped. We are dying at heart-attack rates from inactivity, from NOT walking or bicycling. And as long as the rules of the road favor 1500 lbs of steel and plastic traveling at 30-60mph over roughly 200 lbs of cartilage and organs, capable of traveling from 1-10mph (or those same skins and bones on top of a 25lbs thin machine of oil and aluminum at 10-25mph), then we'll continue to suffer and die from preventable diseases. As long as current law and culture favors oil and gas-propelled vehicles over food-propelled movement, we'll continue to poison our waters, land, air, children and lungs. As long as we continue to promote vehicular use over and above other forms of transport, we promote violence for expediency.

So, I say, bold move Illinois legislature. Good show.