first published by Oregon Coast Today. Paul Haeder and OCT have first rights on this original piece by Haeder.
“I made a pact with myself, maybe 25 years ago: Whatever concessions I have to make in life, I have to at least live by water.” – Mark A. Marks, PhD
I am standing on a deck overlooking the Pacific, high above Agate Beach where 4,000- and 5,000-square foot homes are sited for a broad view of the ocean, with forest land on the east. I hear waves roar this far away.
Inside Mark A. Marks’ abode are dozens of underwater shots of this Newport resident’s walk on the wild side SCUBA diving with great white sharks.
“I knew I was always going to live where water makes noise – by the sea, near a river, on a lake,” he tells me, pointing out a half dozen water features he has added to his backyard.
Then he shows me a trellis system he just built for three kiwi trees he has been tending. Then he spots a furry creature by his feet. “Damn. One of my cats got this,” Doctor Marks says, picking up the thumb-sized rodent. “You know what this is?”
I say, “Some kind of vole,” but Marks corrects me — “Sorex pacificus, Pacific shrew. One of my cats got it.”
The house is covered with photos of Marks diving with what is universally deemed a great big enigmatic predator, the great white shark — Carcharodon Carcharias — as well as the artwork of friends and that which he and his wife, Jill, create. Walls and shelves are outfitted with images of sharks, lions, elephants, fish; bleached skulls of any variety of shark and mammal bare sharp teeth to his guests.
He has a personal library – floor-to-ceiling book collections spanning his myriad interests and avocations. I can spot the ocean out two windows.
While we continue our storytelling repartee about many parts of the globe he has worked in, Marks answers a phone call from Newport’s Discovery Tours proposing a naturalist position on their whale watching cruises.
Discovering “characters” on the Oregon Coast is this column’s purview, and expectedly, I find Marks’ life compelling, one lived in five parts.
Marks admittedly used up four or five of his own lives before setting down roots on the coast the first time. The diver acted quickly the first 24 hours in the area:
“In one day, I got a rental house in Toledo and two jobs in Newport,” laughing as he explains how he ended up here in the late 1980s. He worked at the Hatfield Marine Science Center as a lab assistant and then also throwing in as a lab tech at Ore-Aqua, a now defunct salmon hatchery. He has had many jobs in this area since then.
Eventually, while researching shark behavior for a graduate degree, he ended up 11,000 miles away in South Africa, transforming himself into “the first guy diving outside shark cages” with the animal that made Spielberg famous – Carcharodon Carcharias.
I point to a surfboard in his entryway, and Marks quips: “Good observation is good science.” It’s a local surfer’s board, complete with a bite mark from a great white.
Before South Africa, Marks quit the Newport lab gigs, at the urging of a Hatfield Marine Science Center scientist to pursue a degree at Humboldt State University.
At Humboldt, Marks and others founded the non-profit Shark Protection and Preservation Association. The research on Dyer Island — the underwater highway for great white sharks off South Africa — ensconced Marks into the world of TV shows, documentaries and high-level publications utilizing work he loved: studying socio-biological habits of an apex predator like the great white shark.
“It was the wild west,” he said. “I was the only one outside the cages swimming with white sharks.” He shows me still shots and memorabilia from various scientific and entertainment/documentary gigs he was involved in around the world – National Geographic, Discovery, Smithsonian and others.
He’s back here, aged 57, married to Jill, a physical therapist who splits her time in Eugene and Newport. He’s showing me a critter camera, which has captured a bobcat, coyote and cougar traipsing through his backyard. This is a typical hilltop suburb with Subarus, boats, garages and backyard patios.
He still works on white shark behavior off the Oregon Coast, but funding for satellite tags and telemetry collection/analysis is drying up. For now, Marks is happy to be asked to give talks about his research and cobble together jobs as a paid naturalist, including Alaskan and Caribbean cruises with Holland America.
A story with bite: Part II
“Newport is a great place to come home to.”
He talks to me about his more than 30 years – off and on – living here on the Oregon Coast. He asks me if I am going to be okay living in this locale (I recently moved her December 2018 from Portland), since I have traveled the world physically and intellectually. He knows I am a poet, hard-style essayist, activist.
One hard truth Marks and I conjure up in our hours talking is this: all lives are experienced in chunks, or chapters, and success is only measured by failures. Mark A. Marks may be a shark expert and socio-biology adherent, but he also understands the scope of his own mortal life intersecting with others’ lives.
We talk about his dropping out of school, in San Fernando, and then his solo roustabout at age 14 heading to Las Vegas, of all places. “I learned how to survive there. Really hustle jobs and sources of money making.”
Unschooled in the Three R’s sense, Marks ended up getting his GED, and then hitching up in the US Army. We both know military life, my old man in the air force and then army for 31 years. Tours in the Korean and Vietnam conflicts.
Marks’ numerous military specialty schools, as well as his tutelage with the Rangers, landed him assignments in places like Honduras and Nicaragua.
Jumping out of helicopters, carrying out clandestine military “anti-guerrilla warfare” operations, living out of a rucksack, Marks points out he is more than capable of going it alone and surviving.
Four years later, Marks is veteran, looking for another purpose in life.
That’s what got him to Oregon Coast in the first place – a buddy in Springfield asked him to come out and then told Marks – the consummate scuba diver and surfer – to check out Newport.
Here he was living the life of Nye Beach in the late 1980s, working with Hatfield scientists, and learning more about his inner mettle after years in the army. Marks then heads to Humboldt State and then South Africa for eight years.
I am petting Rainy, a 22-year-old calico Doctor Marks says he got when he was in Arizona, a place where his first wife, Michelle, was finishing her commercial pilot’s training. Nothing is run of the mill for Mark A. Marks: Rainy is from a line of the first test tube cats. Part of a study on increasing the immunity for feline leukemia, Rainy was tagged as a mate. “The test tube cats each had a goat . . . that is, a companion cat from the same lineage who was not part of the drug test. Rainy was the goat.”
He had just finished his second interview with the director of the genetics lab at ASU. “I didn’t get the job as a lab tech, but I got the cat.” That was 1998.
He calls Rainy “Michelle’s cat.”
Before Rainy, came Michelle, love of his life: Eight years away from the states, working on an island, learning about apartheid and the fall of that system, Marks again talks about this next iteration of his life. He tells me he got politically active supporting the cause of Nelson Mandela, and he also explains that as a shark expert, he was not liking what ecotourism and the white shark cage operators were doing to a pristine ecosystem.
He says he was about to go to Mozambique right after closing down Dyer Island lab when he fell in love with an American woman, Michelle, who had come from San Diego to participate in an internship on sharks, a side gig for which Marks made extra money to survive.
“I asked her to marry pretty early in the relationship.”
Michelle went on to learn how to be a pilot while Marks ended up working for Canadian Broadcasting System, BBC Canada, Italian production companies, and Big Fish expeditions. “That’s where I started making money, behind the camera. I created my own little niche market.”
They lived in Florida where his wife was a pilot. Marks traveled a lot to hitch up with film crews.
After Marks tells me about how Michelle died Dec. 19, 2005, off Miami Beach, I went to my computer that night and put in, “Chalk’s Ocean Airways Flight 101,” pulling up many details about how his wife perished.
She had been promoted to captain the year before, and the Chalk flight was heading to Bimini with Christmas shoppers including Sergio Danguillecourt, a board director of Bacardi Ltd. (and a great-great-grandson of the rum company’s founder), and wife, Jacqueline Kriz Danguillecourt.
All 18 passengers died, as well as Capt. Michelle Marks and her co-pilot, because the starboard wing of the 1947 Grumman G-73T Turbine Mallard ripped off mid-air as the flight just got underway.
He shows me his motorcycles, and one in particular, a BMW, has been outfitted to do long-range traveling. One such trip happened after the last presidential election, 2016, and this hardened ex-Army Ranger and shark diver says he had to “get out of my head space about the implications of a Donald Trump presidency” and decided to circumnavigate the USA and Canada. He chose a counterclockwise course.
The stories he tells me about his time in the south are telling for a baby Boomer who shares his home with two cats, a plethora of animal research products, a graduate student who lets out a room, and his new wife of five years, Jill the physical therapist who live part-time in Eugene.
Clocking 14,000 miles coursing through two countries, and tells me that when he ended up in Boston and then Canada, a kind of purge occurred. “I had been to the south, in the army, but I never would have believed things would really get that backwards.”
We repeat how good anecdotal observation makes for good science and good journalism. I try not insert too much of my own diving history and military experience during this wide-ranging interview.
As I diver, I knew through the work of apex carnivore behavior scientists before Marks’ studies that great white sharks are not mindless killers. Doc Marks reiterates some key points for the average visitor to our coast: Those encounters off the Oregon Coast and elsewhere are usually exploratory bites which happen to hit a surfboard and/or human outfitted in a wet suit unintentionally mimicking the shape and color of a seal or sea lion.
“White sharks use their mouths like a hand; their teeth can feel and explore objects the way we use our fingertips,” says Marks whose Shark Protection and Preservation Association (est. at Humboldt State) has added to the scientific research of shark behavior.
Doc Marks stresses shark encounters are rare off the Oregon Coast. Only 28 incidents (all unprovoked and non-fatal) are listed in the Global Shark Attack File for Oregon. Few involved bodily injuries, and the danger is not total human engorgement (that rarely happens, but has been recorded mostly with bull and tiger sharks) but tissue damage and blood loss in the water.
After Michelle perished in the plane crash, Marks details his attempts at outfitting their 41-foot sailboat (the couple’s dream venue) for blue water sailing and ecotourism. He heart wasn’t in it and he threw in the towel a year later.
He came back to Newport shortly thereafter, and got a permit in Oregon to do research on great white sharks. Nobody was studying whites off the Oregon Coast.
He tagged sharks with satellite telemetry tags and attempted to make a go of the research. He worked with other scientists on salmon shark studies, but his love was and is the great white shark. Animals going back 16 million years, these shark species have different migratory and mating habits, as they evolved to do long oceanic crossings. Marks speculates many of the great whites from the North East Pacific are either not crossing or, if they are, they are not mating with their brethren in South Africa, South Australia or South America.
Marks met Jill online, and the Eugene physical therapist quickly accepted his marriage proposal. “We went in on purchasing a dive-research boat together,” he says showing me the vessel in his driveway. High fuel costs and lack of funders for his Oregon Coast white shark research have been impediments in continuing his research and non-profit.
Marks has been hired several times as on-board naturalist for cruise operator, Holland America, and he says during our interview he was actually supposed to be gone, living aboard a ship acting as Alaskan cruise naturalist. A born observer and naturalist, Marks says there is so much more to observe above the surface in Alaskan waters than the more exotic places in the Caribbean where he has also worked.
“Everything there is happening underwater.”
We each down five or six mugs of French press coffee during many hours talking. The sun is setting as I bid Mark A. Marks farewell.
“Life Interrupted” is no slogan for this Newport resident. He is confident watching birds, tending to plants, reading books and picking up the odd job here and there is a decent life.
It’s clear to me he displays the same dichotomy I have seen expressed by many scientists: “I am a self-confessed lover of all wildlife, but when it comes to humans …”
I leave with a dozen other conversation starters for which I was ready to confront Mark A. Marks.
Personally, starting a regular “people of the coast” profile column with Mark A. Marks is apropos: real narratives intertwine nascent lives with old ones; dreams with nightmares; the good with the bad; failures as part of one’s successes.
What makes a place like our coast unusually interesting are the people; however, the Oregon Coast plays a large part in shaping the people who were born or end up here.
We talk about a wide range of issues as birds light on many of Doc Marks’ bird feeders and suet hangers that end up attracting more than a dozen species just in my time with him.
I could end this piece with clichés like “just the tip of the iceberg” or “can’t judge a book by its cover,” but I won’t.
“Look,’ Marks said, “if I never did anything else in my life, I could wake up every day with these birds out there as my companions, and with my books, here on this deck, and I would have no regrets.”
…until we all just start blathering and defecating on all the billionaires’ contracts and words
by Paul Haeder / June 2nd, 2019
America… just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable.
Now I think poetry will save nothing from oblivion, but I keep writing about the ordinary because for me it’s the home of the extraordinary, the only home.
I’m digging the DV piece, “The Idiot” by Jason Holland, since in a critical mass sort of black hole kind of way, his main thesis is reflective of the experiences many of us in the bloody trenches of dying capitalism see/feel/believe minute by minute.
And after all our idiotic overcomplicated plots and schemes, they are but to mask simple truths the idiot facade tries so desperately to avoid; the inner torments of being afraid of not being good enough, not measuring up to our peers, not meeting arbitrary expectations we either accept from others or set for ourselves, or quite simply feeling like we are not worthy of love. So we play these pointless high stakes games which have a rewards as meaningless and worthless as a plastic trophy just to prove our worth. The idiot is a temporal state of being, although many are finer long term examples of displaying the behaviors of the idiot; however none of us are the perfect idiot. To avoid the affectations of being in an idiotic state it takes conscious effort to live our lives moment to moment with authenticity, to be in a state of awareness of our actions, to always be willing to suffer for something worthwhile and to be consistently well reasoned examiners of what constitutes something worthwhile.
That authenticity, moment to moment existence — and it should be a reveling of life — is good, but there is a bifurcating of sorts when many of us are still subject to the masters of Big Brother and Big Business. We are suffering the dualism of the Century, and the more we know, the more we seek and the more we grapple, well, the more emancipated we are, but in that freedom comes some pretty harsh treatment by the masters and their sub-masters and all the Little Eichmann’s that keep the Capitalist’s trains moving like clockwork toward the global demise set in their plastic worlds!
And some of us think Dachau and Auschwitz were bad! We have already seen a hundred of them since 1945.
For me, I have the benefit of being a writer, and at this time, I have this new gig I created myself to bring to the Oregon Coast a sense of the people who are here living or who come here to set down their own stories . . . people who do things to make this world better and themselves better. Something in the draw that brings my subjects for my pieces here to the coast of Oregon. These are people, and they are not perfections or cut-outs or pulverized remnants of humanity that Capitalism mostly demands in it shark tank of inane media manipulation and marketing.
I crack open humanity and get people’s contexts — entire stories upon stories laid down, strata by strata, and cover their own formula for the art of living in harmony in a world of disharmony. Reading my stuff, I hope, will allow readers of this rag, Oregon Coast Today, and its on-line version a better sense of authenticity via people they may or may not even run across in their own lives of being the consummate busy tourist and consumer.
A few of the pieces will be worthy of DV display, and I hope that my attempt at drilling down and “getting people” for who they are and how they got here will better the world, in some small shape. Really small, but small wonders sometimes are the ionic glue of a bettering world.
What is more compelling than the average person captured in a truthful narrative, as counterpoint to a society that delves into the celebrity, the spectacle, the idiocy as Jason puts forth in his piece, “The Idiot.”
In many ways, talking to people who have lived authentic (albeit struggle-prone) lives, or who are just embarking on a nascent stage of multiple iterations of living, I get my sense of grounding in a very flummoxed world of inanity and crass disassociation, as in the disease of pushing away humanity and pushing away the natural world to hitch oneself to the perversions of the billionaire class.
Time and time again, daily, my friends who are still in struggle — still trying to make sense of the perverted world of idiots controlling the message, the economy, the environment, the culture, and the mental-physical-spiritual health of the world, as if this is it, Trump 2.0 — give me news feed after news feed of the quickening of not only idiocy that capitalism and consumerism and war engender in our species, but also examples of the inhumanity driving the agendas of the Fortune 500 Class, the Davos crowd, the Aspen Institute gatherings, et al.
Yet, my friend, Joe the Farmer from Merced, hits the nail on the head by providing his own retort to example after example of the cruelty of capitalism and the US of I — United States of Idiots?
If this doesn’t slap the Hell out of you and rub your nose into the proverbial dog shit of what a criminally insane, inhumane, cruel and thuggish enterprise our government has become, then there is absolutely no hope for your soul. The truth tellers like Manning, Assange, Snowden and others, the brave young guys like Tim DeChristopher that monkey wrenched the sale of oil leases to public lands to try and protect the environment, this fellow that is showing his human side by providing water and aid for those dying in the desert sun, are all facing prison terms or maybe even the death penalty. Their crime? Being a compassionate human being.
What in the fuck is wrong with this country? The republicans enact cruel legislation to protect criminal enterprises, slash taxes for the obscenely rich, while removing any social or environmental protections for the population, (the Flint Michigan water system for example).
The republicans are ruthlessly attacking the environment and endangered species, turning their backs on infrastructure that is endangering peoples lives, while the spineless democrats sit idly by, wringing their hands. The democrats won’t take action against the most openly corrupt president we have ever had, that is daily destroying everything in this country as well as the rest of the world with his insane military budgets, trade wars and climate policies. The democrats response to Trump is to promote Joe Biden, a compilation of Bill and Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Strom Thurman and just about every other corporate whore they could steal parts off of to make their democratic very own version of Donald Trump.
Both the republicans and the democrats promote austerity for the working people and the poor, while stuffing the oligarchs pockets with gold. Both political Parties support endless war and war profiteers but slash budgets for schools, infrastructure, health care and the elderly. Both political Parties shower money on the police state and a corrupt system of justice and private prisons. Both political Parties are turning their heads to what the oil industry is doing to our water and air with fracking and are in fact have promoted legislation to let the oil industry off the hook when it causes unbelievable environmental damage. Both political Parties are doing nothing to check the nuclear industry that is a environmental time bomb waiting to go off and have promoted legislation to limit the industries liability when it does.
What is wrong with the American people that they sit on their collective asses and do nothing while all this is happening? Are they that fucking stupid? Are they that lacking in human decency? Are they that politically dumbed-down that they won’t even fight for their own interests?
The fact that this government corruption has been allowed to go on for years evidently proves that Americans are that stupid and lacking of compassion and politically dumbed-down. Thank God for guys like Dr. Warren the others that are trying to slap some sense into the American public to show us what courage and being humane is all about. Dr. Warren and company shouldn’t be put in jail but our so called leaders sure as Hell should be for their crimes against humanity.
He’s talking about a desert saint of sorts, Scott Warren, who has the power of his call to duty to give water in milk cartons to anyone crossing the Arizona desert. Now that is a hero, yet, he is facing decades in prison. America!
The charges against Warren “are an unjust criminalization of direct humanitarian assistance” and “appear to constitute a politically motivated violation of his protected rights as a Human Rights Defender,” states Amnesty International’s Americas regional director Erika Guevara-Rosas.
“Providing humanitarian aid is never a crime,” Guevara-Rosas added in a statement last week. “If Dr. Warren were convicted and imprisoned on these absurd charges, he would be a prisoner of conscience, detained for his volunteer activities motivated by humanitarian principles and his religious beliefs.”
Yet how many humans in this crime country even give a rat’s ass about one man who is doing the good that all men and women should be doing?
So, here, whatever will come of my new column, “Deep Dive: Go Below the Surface with Paul Haeder,” starting June 7, well, I hope people reading this rag — 18,000 and counting and as they are compelled to hit each longer version of each of my profiles on line, Oregon Coast Today — will understand that life is the sum total of one’s search for meaning and worthy work and community involvement.
Maybe this compulsion toward narrative has always been inside me during my early root setting living in Canada, Maryland, Paris, Edinburgh, Arizona . . . then on that walkabout throughout Latin America, Europe, Vietnam, USA, Central America!
When times get tough, the storyteller gets writing. Ha. Believe you me, the stories we all have collected in this Marquis de Sade world of capital and artery-clogging entertainment and constant death spiral the elites have banked as their Appian Way to Complete Dominance, they make for so much more validation of humanity than anything Hollywood could make.
Point of fact — I attempted to watch the film, Vice, about Dick Cheney, his perverse family, the perversity of neocons fornicating with neoliberalism. It was one of Hollywood’s “cutting edge” dramas. Written and directed by a Saturday Night Live writer. All the usual suspects with Hollywood multi-millions stuffed in their jowls — Christian Bale, Amy Adams, et al.
It wasn’t that good, but I sensed that the filmmakers were all about trying to make something that was “different.” I didn’t nod off during the viewing. But, I unfortunately had the DVD so I went to the extras, and then, the behind the scenes of the making of Vice. This is when things went south real quickly with neoliberal, Democrat-leaning Hollywood creeps. We get every goofy platitude about each and every department’s genius in making this film. Every actor fawns the other actor for his or her amazing performance.
Then the Limey, Christian Bale, yammers on and on about he was all about making Dick Cheney human, going into his good side, being cognizant of Cheney the human. Rubbish and this is the quality of men, adults, in our society — multimillionaires with gobs of limelight and credit and awards and houses and yachts thrown at them, and they can’t even begin to attack the cause — capitalism, rampant competitiveness, droll I-got-mine-too-bad-you-can’t-get-yours thinking. Hollywood is the anti-culture, the flagging bumbling money changers, the money makers, the money grubbers, and well, everything is about the pockets and the suits and the “executive producers,” i.e. Bankers.
Oh god, what a trip going into these Hollywood people’s hot yoga, macrobiotic diet, four-hour-a-day workout minds. The director, McKay, actually thinks this drama — make-believe — has given the world new stuff, new insights, new news about the Cheney-Rumsfeld-Bush-Reagan-Bush world of prostitute politics.
As if there were no real journalists working on all the pre-September 11 illegalities of the republican party and then the post-September 11 evisceration of the few rights the people of the world and USA had before full spectrum war on our planet.
As if journalists hadn’t cracked open the Koch brothers, the fake think tanks, all the pre-Truman/post-Truman lies of empire, from Roy Cohen, through to the rigged systems of oppression. Way before any trivial Hollywood wannabe open her eyes.
Entertainment and a few laughs at the expense of millions of bombed-dead people, millions more suffering-a-lingering-death daily because of Hollywood and USA policies and the evangelicals and the Crypto-Zionists bombing “the other” back to the stone age. The movie, Vice.
Racists, misogynists, misanthropes, one and all. Yet, we gotta love these democrat-leaning guys and gals making films, having millions stuffed up every possible orifice until their brains gel.
Insight into the flippancy that is Hollywood the Power Broker! Watching people like Amy Adams and Steve Carell and Sam Rockwell play this soft-shoe goofball show, and then in the little “Making of the movie Vice” documentary (sic-infomercial) blathering on and on about the greatness of the script and every cog of the machine that churns out this pabulum, well, it steels me to continue my small-time, no-fame, big-effing-deal gig writing people profiles to bring some sense to a world captured by capital . . . idiocy!
Oh, how we fall in line. Over at Counterpunch, that cloistered world of writers has the countdown for 2018 — Best Films of the Year, as in the most conscious, socially (give me a effing break!) that is. Nothing in American society once it floats on the offal barrel is sacred, socialist, communist.
Peak TV is creating more opportunities for independent film directors, and for new stories to be told. More films from around the world are released on streaming every day, and Netflix spent an estimated 13 billion dollars on content just this year. More cash available can sometimes mean more stories by and about communities of color, women, transgender and gender nonconforming people, and other communities Hollywood has long ignored. But the movie industry is still primarily about making profit, and it’s main business is reinforcing the status quo, including churning out films that glorify capitalism, war, and policing.
Below are 2018’s top ten conscious films that made it through these barriers, plus twenty more released this year that you may want to check out.
[…]
Hollywood doesn’t have a great record in covering presidential politics (remember Kevin Costner in Swing Vote?). Vice, comedy director Adam McKay’s follow up to The Big Short, explores the Bush/Cheney presidency, attempting to make history and polemic accessible to a wide audience. It’s not as effective as his previous film, but it’s a good history, especially for those less familiar with the ins and outs of the early 2000s corporate power grab.
Lighten up already, many a friend and acquaintance tell me. “You are going to burn out like one of the bulbs you use underwater to do your night dives. Way too much shining the hoary light onto the more hoary caverns of American society. Let things go.”
Ha, well, how can we? We are entertained to death, as Neil Postman sates,
What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy.
As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.” In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we desire will ruin us.
This book [Amusing Ourselves to Death] is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.
And so it goes, as I trail the acrid dust devil of injustice — my own and the veterans’ and families’ I helped just months ago in Portland as a social worker for, drum roll, homeless veterans (and some came with families, including babies and service dogs).
I’ve written about it here and elsewhere — the Starvation Army. The deceitful, unethical, possibly murderous Starvation Army. You see, where I worked, I had these insane Nurse Ratched’s lording over grown men and women treating them like criminals, and infantiles, and the constant berating and recriminations. It was anything but social work 101. Anything but trauma-informed care. Anything but caring people, enlightened helpers; instead, think mean, warped people who within their own broken self’s, do all the wrong things for veterans.
I decided to jump ship, and, alas, a few lawyers advised me I couldn’t get far with a hostile workplace complaint until I went through the state of Oregon’s, Bureau of Labor and Industries (BOLI) quasi-judicial pathway.
There was great harm put upon the veterans, great harm put upon the staff, because a director was all into herself and her self-described Jesus Saves bullshit, yammering on about her former cocaine addiction and booze abuse and 350 pounds of flesh, as well as her own failings as a mother. This place has 100 people living in it temporarily, while Starvation Army receives taxpayer money, all part of the poverty pimping Starvation/ Salvation Army’s SOP.
In the end, relying on idiots in any state bureaucracy to carry forth an investigation was not my idea of justice. I did my due diligence and filed grievances, first with the Starvation Army, and, then with BOLI. I contacted VA officials, state politicians, and the media. To no avail. They too are accomplices!
To make a long and stupid Byzantine story short, my prediction of zero assistance and zero admonishing from the state to the executive director and the higher ups of the Starvation Army played out. BOLI is a toothless and empty-hearted agency, staffed by soulless Little Eichmann’s counting their paychecks and amassing points to their state sourced pension fund.
I have moved on, as usual, and the injustice perpetrated upon me is minor in the scheme of things. The veterans, however, already foisted with trauma, PTSD, administrative rape, etc., are still vulnerable to the Nurse Ratched’s of the inhumane social services that serves (sic) non-profits and religious crime syndicates like the Starvation Army.
Here, “How the Salvation Army Lives Off (and thrives with) a Special Brand of Poverty Pimping”
Here, “Alcohol, Atheism, Anarchy: The Triple A Threat to the Pro-Capitalist Salvation Army”
I have since my departure been in contact with a few veterans, and talked a few off the proverbial ledge — several that wanted to off themselves because of the Nurse Ratched’s they encounter at the Starvation Army, in the VA, and in non-profits. This is the reality, and it’s sick, in real perverted American time — “Hundreds witness veteran shoot and kill himself in VA waiting room”!
In December, Marine Col. Jim Turner, 55, put his service uniform on, drove to the Bay Pines Department of Veterans Affairs, and shot himself outside the medical center, leaving a note next to his body.
“I bet if you look at the 22 suicides a day you will see VA screwed up in 90 percent,” it read.
This is Trump, this is Biden, this is Clinton, this is the lot of them, callous and broken capitalists, who have sold their souls to the devil and brains to Jeff Bezos, et al.
And it ain’t going to get fixed until we cut away the cancer. Really cut away, daily, in small acts of defiance, great collective acts of beating the system.Not sure what that great director Ava Duvernay says about more and more movies like her 13th or this new Netflix mini-series on the Central Park Five , When They See Us will do to eventually get enough Americans (70 percent are racist to the core) to demand change in the criminal injustice system of private prisons, Incarceration Complex, Profitable Prosecutions. That all those cops, dailies, elites, deplorables, Trumpies, and Trump said terrible terrible things about these 5 juveniles, calling them animals, or super predators like the Clinton Klan, well, imagine, an insane 2016 runner for the highest crime lord position of the land, POTUS, Donald Trump, after these five men were released after all the evidence found them innocent, sputtering with his big fat billionaire’s fourth grader words that the Central Park Five are guilty, guilty, guilty.
Ava —The press coverage was biased. There was a study done by Natalie Byfield, one of the journalists at the time for the New York papers who later wrote a book about covering the case, and it saw that a little more than 89 percent of the press coverage at the time didn’t use the word “alleged,” that we had irresponsibility in the press corps at the time not to ask second questions and literally take police and prosecutor talking points and turn those into articles that people read as fact, and proceeded to shape their opinions about this case that essentially spoils the jury pool, so that these boys were never given a chance.
Trump’s comments in his ads that he took out in 1989 were taken out just two weeks after the crime was announced—they hadn’t even gone to trial, so it was impossible for them to have an impartial jury pool. The printing of their names in the papers for minors, and where they lived, was a jaw-dropper. All of this was done by “reputable” papers in New York that we still read, so I’m curious how these papers take responsibility for their part in this, and also possibly use this to review the part they play in other cases that may not be as famous as this.
Thus, she makes my case — the callous and racist and sexist and xenophobic US Press, and here we are today, 2019, enter Amusing Ourselves to Death and a Brave New World.
The greatest triumphs of propaganda have been accomplished, not by doing something, but by refraining from doing. Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth.
–Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, “Preface”
Alas, though, we have to keep those words coming, even sent to the great gray hearts and souls populating those state agencies whose workers are supposed to investigate the workplace safety concerns of workers, and are supposed to prevent workplace harassment.
I write to break through the fog, and to envelop a new way of seeing my world, for me and for the few readers that dabble in even attempting to start, let alone finish, these missives.
Huxley was right — ” Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly — they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.” Brave New World, “Chapter 4”
school daze are here to stay if we don’t stop capitalism
There is nothing very remarkable about being immortal; with the exception of mankind, all creatures are immortal, for they know nothing of death. What is divine, terrible, and incomprehensible is to know oneself immortal. — Borges, “The Immortal”, IV, in The Aleph (1949)
All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art. — Jorge Luis Borges
I knew it would come at me sooner or later, that feeling of dread that I had steeled myself against . . . staving off that realization that the books are so cooked that every level of societal organization in the USA (elsewhere, too, especially UK, evidenced by the movie, I, Daniel Blake ) is rotting from the inside-out, outside-in. I’ve kept that juggling inside my mental space for a long time, but the blood-brain barrier has been pretty much intact, cloistering away intellectual realization from emotional acceptance, i.e. vulnerability. It’s this inoculation many of us in the middle of the muck — radical journalism, even more radical social services, and, for this article, beyond radical education — have to succumb to and for which we have to continue to ramify our emotional ‘scapes with boosters to make it through a day or week or month of travails.
I have to insert a full disclaimer: I know I am not living in Guatemala, San Salvador, Bangladesh, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Somalia or Palestine. Things — basic living conditions — are so-so grotesque in other countries where capitalism and despotic fascism have ensconced those places with the plague of Little Eichmann’s and narcissistic racists who do the bidding of the moneyed classes (sic). Millions of babies a year are dying of gut diseases because of shitty water systems or none at all, because of Capitalism; the plague of misogyny is destroying the futures of women and girls in places like Saudi Arabia or a thousand places, because of religion; resources are continually being polluted, tainted or collapsing because of Western Culture’s rapacious appetites, all flowing out of the sewage drain that defines Capitalism. All of that to the 10th power in so-called “third world” societies compared our dragging lives, and, mine, sure (since I maybe enlightened but I am pressed into the strata of the death system, USA capitalism), sure, how can I complain? Anything the rest of the non-Western world has to go through daily overshadows even the hard times many of “our” people in “our” country face with this old time religion of corporate-government fascism.
Good stuff daily at Dissident Voice, as in:
It is strange to watch the sleepy drama of airports, in which a bourgeoisie and a working class effortlessly intermingle, both seemingly inured to the routines of capitalist life. Something soulless inhabits the pace of capitalist life. One observes it here in the deadened gaze of the wage workers, watching their lives tick away in terminal jobs; but also in the ceaseless arrivals and departures of businessmen charging off to another sales conference; and in the harried rush of families to make it on their annual holiday junket. One wonders if any of these classes, more the workers than the professional caste, might ever revolt against the system that keeps them ensnared in their drudgery.
We’ll be getting to that soulless rendering of Capitalist lives in our svchools in a minute. For now, I’m not talking about a complete blow-out of my emotions here, but I knew that through teaching, yet again, in a PK12 system out here on the Oregon Coast, as a hired gun substitute teacher, I’d open myself up to that sinking feeling not so much of despair, but of validation that the entire country has been sold down the river with a super majority of its people colonized by the thinking, or lack thereof, created by the taker class, the destroyer species, so more victims by the thousands in their cribs are created for the elite to chew up ever so much and completely every day.
Then millions daily in our public schools, chewed up and spit out. But still perfect marks for a society of Mafiosi-PayPal-PayDay loan sharks that profit in pain, dissolution, human toil, poverty, struggle, economic hell, emotional insanity, and ethical dissuasion.
I knew going into this research project — to discover out how to wrap up my concept for a short book on The Good, Bad and Ugly of American Ed — it would be rough sailing on the edges of this strange continent since I am working in a rural county with high poverty rates, high parental drug use, homelessness and consistent precarity in the economic realm, with parents working 12-hour gigs or four-jobs-to-a-family, and a class of people who have shuttered themselves with beach-combing, Pinot Gris loving, tourist junkets to Mexico, la Provence in France and ski resorts and mud cleansing camps in Montana. Plus, it’s Oregon, on the coast, a very racist place/history of sundown laws (not to say New York City or Chicago or LA aren’t racist super max militarized black man/woman/Latinix hating police mafia), where the rare sane and giver tribesperson is a diamond yet to be found.
Inoculation for me is that I might find personal fortitude from all my many years geriatrically speaking and many more experiences living on the planet dredging up all the detritus deposited in the process of bearing witness to the failure that is America — the Prison Complex, America — the Warring Complex, America — the Enemy of All Good People Complex, America — the Vapidity Complex, America — the All Polluting Complex. One can still hold out hope for some semblance of solidarity from cohorts and like-minded individuals within my geographical region.
The truth is that while the national media, and the national news and national academics blather on and on about, sure, important issues such as USA Democrats and Republicans parsing out why locking up whistle blowers or jailing journalists like Assange is good/bad, or how the USA ended up bombing thousands of civilians in Raqqa, or say the story about Claudia Patricia Gomez Gonzalez’s family suing the Border Patrol for $100 million after the Guatemalan was murdered by an agent last year on the Texas border, the work to be done at the local level, even within a fifth grade classroom, is monumental, almost impossible in this murderous carnival of capitalism gone rogue. Wave after wave of spasms after viewing or hearing any number of stories pumped out on the ticker-tape voyeurism that is Bing or Yahoo or Fox or CNN “news” (sic) feeds is interesting in an ironic way — as a student of journalism-media-public opinion trends.
But the toll on communities, on individual children, is so-so deep and grave and beyond the abilities of a Melinda Gates or Michelle Obama or Elon Musk to even begin to comprehend, let alone beyond their capabilities to just sit down and honorably and truthfully engage in healing, or dialogue.
Witnessing the absurdity that is American and Capitalistic exceptionalism, in real time, during work, while trying to accomplish something worthy, like teaching youth six years to 18 years old, puts a heavy toll on some of us when we many times confront the injustice and insanity of it all, head on. It’s a toll tied to our personal activities of daily living in a colonized world, where, no kidding, someone like me (and I have very few friends or acquaintances who would agree with me on the following spot on quote half a century old, and counting) can’t remove what has become a default fine print disclaimer that should be plastered on anything coming out of America, and American-drenched marketing campaigns of the murderers who run Corporations, large and small:
If America is the culmination of Western white civilization, as everyone from the Left to the Right declares, then there must be something terribly wrong with Western white civilization. This is a painful truth; few of us want to go that far…. The truth is that Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Marx, Balanchine ballets, et al, don’t redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history; it is the white race and it alone—its ideologies and inventions—which eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself. Susan Sontag, Partisan Review, Vol. 34 No. 1 1967.
This is no flippant thing I’m expressing here, yet so many people have attacked this critique, Sontag’s, that is, and my ascribing it, so deeply, and they rebuff even considering it with so much contrarianism filled with paranoia, or that disease of white guilt, or exceptionalism, or something more, something really nefarious.
The bottom line, a fourth grade thinker like Trump and his coterie of asinine, ignorant, rich, degraded, full-on psychopathic followers, in and out of his administration, hate my students. These students who are 30 to a class. Students who have four or five bullies in each class. Students who have driveling principals who are afraid of their own shadows. Students who are 576 to one counselor on hand. Students who have Chromebooks and giant caterpillar math games in seventh grade. Students who are fed the entrails of fast food and the most dangerous food for lunch that it just makes a grown person cry. Students who are forced in classrooms with bachelor degreed teachers, mostly all with their hearts in the right place, but floundering under the weight of shitty wages and economies that take up more than half our income to just make rent.
Students with local beaches that have Memorial Day warnings of fecal matter in the tides. Students with clear cuts peppered all around them and the follow up aerial spraying of Agent Orange like derivatives to keep the invasives down. Students who have no parks to speak of, no museums, no trolley services to help them get from one beach to the next. Students who are forced to listen to military recruiters, and students bred in the faux patriotism that calls all boys and girls to seriously consider the all-volunteer military (economic draft, that is) as a gateway to college, when the majority of youth see no end in sight in school.
We hate these kids, if one were to look at our education policies run by an Amway sales person, Betsy DeVos, and if we look at all the other cabinet level people, all those heads of our supposed government agencies for, by and because of the people, and listen to what they want in terms of tearing down every economic, environmental, educational, retirement, housing, health, energy, conservation, community development safety net , how in god’s name (sic) can any thinking adult believe that this administration or any of them really cares about the 80 percent of the country, the majority, our youth, our babies, our teens, our future?
Therein lies the catalyzing moment Friday that spurred me to write this angst-leveling piece — I again, after dozens of gigs, got it from the horse’s mouth — the students — that the schools are bullying enterprises, where many in these classes call young girls and boys “fat jelly rolls, fatsos, stupid, sissies, retards, fags,” and alas, nothing is being done to rectify this. Nothing at the administration level, at the classroom level, at the parental level, at the assembly level, nothing.
And so one of these counselors, one in the school, just displayed so many levels of malpractice, stupidity, telling me, a substitute, that unless I heard the boys yelling these things, and even if the girls and boys that are the victims say that happened, are crying, are withdrawn, there is nothing he can do.
Then this ignoramus spewed some platitude about, “I told Mary to not let those boys take her power away . . . to not give them her power.” This is the state of retarded adult thinking, pure reckless operating procedures.
Then, students tell me to not be so worried that the class is going bonkers or is disruptive, or that student x and y are being not only idiots, but disrespectful of me, an elder, in some sense. That this goes on with the regular teacher, and that the students have complained about x and y bully, but to no avail.
I ask them how they even learn with all the disruptions, all the students x and y getting pulled from the classroom, or all the bells and breaks and idiotic things that supposedly have been built into the curriculum because the powers that be believe young minds can’t stick to a problem or a topic for more than 10 minutes, and anything beyond 10 minutes has to be programmed into some Chromebook moving cartoon or video game.
Teachers in middle school who tell students, “go figure it out yourself,” when confronted with a math problem. Teachers who look like they just spent a day in Yemen under Saudi-USA bombardment after a day’s teaching.
This system for the most part is ruinous of human celebration, ruinous of honoring and stewarding young minds and bodies.
Alas, yes, fixing education is easy, but not under capitalism, not under the weight of the core curriculum or with the shackles of No Child Left Behind or through all the degrading junk that is shoveled down young people’s throats. Nothing in the classroom is mattering, and fixing the education system again, is what the book I am about to launch is all about.
I guess what triggered me was all the bullying, all the poor ass kids who must have demons for parents, because the amount of disrespect for teachers and peers and visitors is deafening. I am not saying all the youth are like these punks, or even half are like that, but if you get six out of 30 in a class who control the message, control the chemistry of the group dynamics, who are always vying for warped levels of attention and disruptive shenanigans, then the learning experiment begins to wither on the vine.
Add to that significant numbers of youth with behavioral plans and learning plans, youth with reading issues, with intellectual disabilities, or psychological disabilities. Youth with chronic illness. Youth from broken families. Youth with some family member in jail and with an addiction. Youth with no sense of community. Entire elementary schools, middle schools and high schools that hardly ever have anyone from the community come in to facilitate learning, let alone cadres of visiting local and regional experts in biology or other fields, or artists or just plain wise elders from tribes.
This in and of itself shows that Trump and all the suits and skirts backing him HATE America, and the way they are making America great again with untold numbers of more and more victims, beaten down by the forces of oppression and repression and suppression at earlier and earlier ages, this is the deplorables MAGA taped on their withering asses.
Again, though, “the principal never does anything to these bullies . . . he just tells them that he will give them something if they stop bullying us . . . but they don’t stop . . . there are no consequences . . . and we just have to take it.”
Now, dear reader, take that to the heart of your soul and really begin to think how we are going to get out of all the colluding and colliding messes we face in this destructive warring society when we are creating more and more causalities at younger and younger ages who will never ever be able to be a part of the solution.
Truly, when the school administration knows/does diddle squat, and when some goofy counselor tells students that “getting upset about a bully is like your kryptonite . . . letting the bullies bother you is handing them your power,” a grown man not only wants to cry, but he wants to smack that puke of a person from here to kingdom come.
Seriously.
I finish off after today talking to several people about the state of youth, the state of our schools, the state of our young people’s lack of critical thinking skills. So many civilians, or citizens, think they know what’s wrong with education, or what’s up with parents, or why millennials or this generation are broken. So many of these same adults have zero tolerance for creativity, outside the box thinking, and investing in REAL education, REAL outdoor schools, REAL schools where youth are building solar panels, living in tepees, growing vegetables, planting permaculture gardens, raising chickens, collecting eggs, doing art, making instruments from which to make music, doing community film projects on the old timers, going to old folks homes and reading and performing, or bringing in homeless people to feed and clothe.
Real work, real learning, real systems thinking teaching.
Imagine hundreds or thousands of studens working on drive-by photography shoots, telling neighborhood history projects, building wheelchair ramps for the handicapped, getting into real businesses and learning how to be entrepreneurs, having bio-diesel buses to the state capitals weekly.
We know how to lead and follow, teach and learn, share and provide. But the systems of oppression in Capitalism make it virtually impossible to do any good with not only our young but our old, or those with disabilities, or those just out of prison, or those who are traumatized by the most brutal parents and neighborhoods.
Take the following to the bank. Yes, John wrote this decades ago, and, yes, he believed we could do wonders with schooling at home and within the communities. He did not anticipate the powers of Capitalism to generate more and more finely grained sacrifice zones at the census track level, regionally wide, entire states succumbing to an un-United States. He did not anticipate the dog-eat-dog nature of capitalism, nor did he really delve into the murderous powers that have harnessed all economic models and all business plans that the USA produces. Trillions spent on war, billions spent on propagandizing this rotten economic system, billions spent on policing and jailing, billions spent on entrapping more and more people into the madness of screens and phones and idle self-aggrandizement and narcissism.
Community schools, and schools inside the companies, and forcing bosses to give time off for workers to tend to the schools. Of course, we need to own our schools, and we need Pearson Publishing and the thousands of other leeches and bottom feeders in educational publishing and curriculum design and management and testing and computerization of learning and on-line madness to be sent to the dung heap.
I’ve noticed a fascinating phenomenon in my thirty years of teaching: schools and schooling are increasingly irrelevant to the great enterprises of the planet. No one believes anymore that scientists are trained in science classes or politicians in civics classes or poets in English classes. The truth is that schools don’t really teach anything except how to obey orders. This is a great mystery to me because thousands of humane, caring people work in schools as teachers and aides and administrators, but the abstract logic of the institution overwhelms their individual contributions. Although teachers to care and do work very, very hard, the institution is psychopathic — it has no conscience. It rings a bell and the young man in the middle of writing a poem must close his notebook and move to a different cell where he must memorize that humans and monkeys derive from a common ancestor.
Children learn what they live. Put kids in a class and they will live out their lives in an invisible cage, isolated from their chance at community; interrupt kids with bells and horns all the time and they will learn that nothing is important or worth finishing; ridicule them and they will retreat from human association; shame them and they will find a hundred ways to get even. The habits taught in large-scale organizations are deadly.
Whatever an education is, it should make you a unique individual, not a conformist; it should furnish you with an original spirit with which to tackle the big challenges; it should allow you to find values which will be your road map through life; it should make you spiritually rich, a person who loves whatever you are doing, wherever you are, whomever you are with; it should teach you what is important, how to live and how to die.”
What’s gotten in the way of education in the United States is a theory of social engineering that says there is ONE RIGHT WAY to proceed with growing up.
― John Taylor Gattoo, Dumbing us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling
the daily headlines, 24/7, display the insanity of the elite, even (especially) the Ivy Tower and Corporate Loving scientists (see below, methane into CO2 at $12K a ton)
Greenhouse gas emissions from the plastic lifecycle threaten the ability of the global community to keep global temperature rise below 1.5°C. By 2050, the greenhouse gas emissions from plastic could reach over 56 gigatons—10-13 percent of the entire remaining carbon budget.
If plastic production and use grow as currently planned, by 2030, these emissions could reach 1.34 gigatons per year—equivalent to the emissions released by more than 295 new 500-megawatt coal-fired power plants. By 2050, the cumulation of these greenhouse gas emissions from plastic could reach over 56 gigatons—10–13 percent of the entire remaining carbon budget. Plastic & Climate: The Hidden Costs of a Plastic Planet
Look, this blog can go deep, long, detailed, with some amount of layering. That’s life, man, layers, webs, connectivity, intersectionalities, confluences.
At the cellular level, pure complex. At the quantum level, absolutely multifaceted. String theory or the wood wide web, it all posits that some in the Homo Sapiens line have the ability to connect and see the systems and be part of that deep thinking process, holistically, and to delve into this one life we have on planet earth as a way to enhance the human and total ecological condition.
But the fact is humanity has been seeded with pathogens — those coming from the rot of marketers, snake oil salesmen, war lords, chemical conjurers, dream spinners, dirty thinkers, greed generators. I’m not saying that there are that many in the 7.4 billion that ascribe this above. It’s a small but in the scheme of things powerful critical mass of haters and abusers.
Raping women with pregnancy laws, raping lakes with lead and mercury, raping minds with the rot of Pearson Publishing-Google Chrome books, standardized thinking, and hope in the form of material things.
Just go to any specific subject matter on a typical university campus or look at any societal category or current events heading, and we can see how crisis after crisis, social injustice after injustice, environmental despoilment after despoilment and emotional dredging after dredging have colonized the Western mind, the American landscape.
Here, Vandana, in a nutshell, our life, food, fucked up by Gates and Bayer and the titans of harm and murder.
This arena, Shiva’s work, which is intersectional for sure, will never be allowed in most PK12 schools, first, because the standardized pablum, common corrupted core, allow no real thinking. I am teaching youth and have taught college English and communications classes, and hands down, the majority of students are not just deer caught in the headlights of greed and parasitic capitalism, but rather rabid raccoons with streams of garbage dangling from rotting teach caught in the spotlights of a punishment society run by ruthless and pathological men, and their few colonized women.
VANDANA SHIVA: Well, oneness is the recognition that, A, we are part of one planet, and we are one humanity. And unless we live with that consciousness and shape every moment of our production and consumption with that consciousness, we are going to destroy ourselves, which we are. The melting of the glaciers is one of the very severe indicators.
The 1 percent, of course, is the symbol of the concentration of wealth under the rules of the neoliberal economies, that are basically, on the one hand, turning every natural resource into a war zone. Even the Venezuelan issue is really a war over oil.
But war over seeds, that’s my life’s work, to keep seeds free, because they literally are a war over control of seeds, by a poison cartel of three—Monsanto and Bayer, Syngenta and ChemChina, Dow and DuPont—all of them with their roots in Hitler’s Germany and finding chemicals to kill people. No wonder they’re still killing people. No wonder they’re killing our butterflies and our bees and our pollinators.
And every indicator is showing we are not just in a severe climate catastrophe; we are in the sixth mass extinction. And both the species extinction and the climate catastrophe are two sides of the same coin.
But do we even have an hour or two a week to get youth to read, to hear minds like Shiva’s, to work through the critical thinking processes needed to bring down these devils, these abominations like Gates and Bayer and Boeing and Big Pharma and Raytheon and Shell, and, well, put in this blank___________________________ any number of Fortune 1000 and Dow Jones ticket LLC names and you will then have a list of true demons of the Jeffrey Dahmer kind.
SHIVA on Democracy Now : Well, Bayer, everyone thinks they began starting with aspirin. They began, for Hitler’s Germany, making Zyklon B, the gas that was used to kill millions in the concentration camps. They were part of IG Farben. IG Farben was the cartel that was tried at Nuremberg. One of Bayer’s inventions is heroin.
And it was called “heroin” because it made you feel like a hero. I think one future program you could do, Amy, is how the devastation of our societies, how the destruction of the economy of Mexico has created the drug trade; how the devastation of rural America, as well as the unemployment in the industrial belt, has created the opioid crisis; how Punjab, the land of the Green Revolution, 75 percent youth are now drug addicts.
So, Bayer bought out Monsanto. Bayer bought—so, Monsanto today is Bayer. And it’s a German company. But these are global companies. They have no home. They have no loyalty. They are accountable to no citizens. All of them work through tax havens. You know, if you know—I think it’s—which is the place in America that’s a tax haven, where all of the companies are registered? Delaware. Delaware. All of—including Monsanto. So, Monsanto was bought out by Bayer for the simple reason that they wanted to erase the name of Monsanto, which has become such a dirty name.
But when I did this book, Oneness vs. the 1%, I wanted to really figure out, you know, what are the stocks, what are the ownerships. That’s when I realized that the majority stocks in all the corporations that rule our world are owned by the investment funds, which is where the billionaires stock their money. The biggest, BlackRock, the second biggest, Vanguard, they were nothing until the 2008 Wall Street disaster. Last year, BlackRock was $6 trillion—$6 trillion. They lost 30 percent with one case, of Monsanto’s Roundup Ready causing cancer. It’s a Californian case of Dewayne Johnson. And the jurors ruled that—
Roundup is the herbicide that kills everything, but it has been known by the World Health Organization to be a carcinogen. Monsanto attacked the World Health Organization, like they attacked me, like they attack anybody who speaks the truth and tells good science.
But a Californian jury has ruled. And the day the ruling came, Bayer lost 35 percent. So, when people feel, “Oh, these guys are too powerful,” I say, “They’re just three. We are 300 million species. We are 7 billion people. We are more.”
And secondly, they are a bubble, that has exploded with fictions of financial multiplication, with rent collections. Basically, Monsanto and Bayer are nothing but rent collectors. They are the lifelords of today, like feudalism had the landlords. They do no work. They do nothing. They don’t breed seed. They make poison, and then collect rents. I think we need a better world in terms of how we grow our food.
Ironically, most Americans I talk with — so-called greenies or Democrats or Obama lovers, or any of the ones that believe Biden would be better than Trump and Sanders would be better than Biden and Warren would be better than Bernie and, well, you get the picture — they have no idea how messed up capitalism is, or they don’t want to believe all the messed up things that this system seeds into their communities and even the entire regions they live in.
They have to have their perversions — Trump, Pompeo, Abrams, Kissinger, Clarence Thomas, and, well, just use this blank_________________ and fill in that demonic name, that frat boy freak, or the female version like Sarah Huckebee Sanders or any of the female freaks or people of color who stand behind the perversion that is Trump the Leader of Deplorables. They will never ever attack the billionaire class that golfs with Michelle or pays Barak his cool $350K per insipid talk.
Gates, Bill and Melinda:
By putting influence on the government of India, because just like there’s a federal structure in America, and your taxation system in Massachusetts is different from the taxation system of Oregon, Oregon is different from the taxation system in New York, they made it one uniform GST.
Before that, Bill Gates—and I have a story in there, how Bill Gates and the other IT industry worked to get cash banned. They called it the “war on cash.” Now, 90 percent of India’s economy is cash. Overnight, everyone lost their lifetime savings. Everyone was made poor. Everyone was made vulnerable. Demonetization is what it was called, and the GST. These are the two things that are being debated in our national election lead-up right now.
Bezos is now working with our dear Bill Gates. They want a 0 percent duty—0 percent duty—on e-commerce. Does it mean that when they ship things, they don’t ship goods? No, they ship goods, but with zero taxation. The person on the ground in a real local economy will be paying a tax. As it is, they have become more expensive. The real economy has been made artificially more expensive because of the cheating by the money machine.
Well, as is known and is in the book, Bill Gates did not invent anything. The BASIC program was made by some mathematics professors in a college. The Office operating system was by a software engineer, and he bought it for $50,000. He’s built an empire by creating patents on software. And the first WTO meeting in Singapore gave him tax concessions, which is why all the IT industry moved to India. The fact that Silicon Valley became India Silicon Valley is because they could save $40 billion annually by paying lower wages for the same work. It was an outsourcing of software, all for Bill Gates. With his accumulation of money and making any communication system illegal, like the communication system through real currency and forcing digital payments, he’s the one who gains, because all the software for all the digital economy, he collects rents and royalties on that.
And then he started to put some of his money into philanthropy. And everyone thinks, “Wow! He’s such a generous man. He gives so much.” But I’ve done an analysis in the book. Every place he gives to is his former future markets. I’ll give you a simple example. So, the first generation of GMOs, the Bt cotton, the Roundup Ready soy and Roundup Ready corn, have started to breed superpests and superweeds. So now they’re trying to get new GMOs based on gene editing and gene drives. In gene editing, not only is Gates financing the research, he has created a company for the patents. It’s called Editas. So, he will collect rents when gene editing is pushed through.
And worse, in the United States, half the farmlands are overtaken by superweeds. The most important one is Palmer amaranth. Amaranth is a sacred crop for us. We eat it. Now, the U.S. Defense system DARPA and Bill Gates have joined hands for a new technology called gene drives to push species to extinction. And they want to drive the amaranth to extinction. And there’s a footnote in that report saying, “Oh, yeah, there will be a food insecurity impact on India. They eat amaranth.” No, there will be a food security impact on the world. There is an—this is an acceleration of the race to extinction. It is immoral. It should be made illegal.
Oh, then I go over to Grist, that bizarre magazine! I used to have students in Spokane go to this digital magazine to start conversations. But it is from Seattle, Seattle-based, and my time in Seattle, living and working, and the times I had to associate with Seattlites, well, it makes sense that this magazine, Grist, is so-so bullshit, middle of the road, and, yes, sometimes it gets environmental stuff right but it can’t deal with real heavyweights like Shiva! Attacking Shiva by another pencil neck hiker. Here, in this little pencil doozy:
Nathanael Johnson — When I look for leaders, I look for people who are able to keep those soft, big-picture goals squarely in focus while they grapple with the nitty-gritty details. It’s the people with a combination of romantic and rationalist traits — with the heart of a poet and the mind of a mathematician — that make meaningful progress.
I’d like to think that Shiva could still become one of those people, but at this stage she has invested all her rhetorical capital on demonizing genetic engineering. I still think that Shiva’s big-picture critique is valid, and her work for social justice is valuable. I just wish that she’d accept reasonable evidence to figure out the causes of the problems she’s identified, rather that explaining away evidence by saying that Monsanto now “control[s] the entire scientific literature of the world.”
Oh well, a magazine run by a former state rep — from Wikipedia: Brady Piñero Walkinshaw (born March 26, 1984) is an American politician who served in the Washington State House of Representatives from 2013 to 2017. Walkinshaw represented the 43rd legislative district, which encompasses much of central Seattle. Since 2017, he has served as CEO of Grist, a Seattle-based online magazine focusing on environmental news. He had the endorsement of the Gay and Lesbian Victory Fund and The Seattle Times, but lost the election to Pramila Jayapal.
Back back to the insanity that hooked me to the title and subtitle above — these Stanford people, cooking up more schemes, that will fail. Making money, in their minds, collecting carbon by producing carbon from methane. Insanity, the premise. Inside their silos, and again, a world with 9 billion people needs HUGE multi-regional planning, a world where women control birthrates, where education is the top product of the day, where worthy work and equitable economies will drive people to eat healthy, to grow healthy, to restore forests, corals, the bloody plankton that make 1/2 our oxygen. But, alas, you throw hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to these superstar tenured faculty, and then they get tens of thousands for speaking and more for consulting with the capitalists, well, you get this! Vision for a Profitable Climate Future
Most scenarios for removing carbon dioxide typically assume hundreds of billions of tons removed over decades and do not restore the atmosphere to pre-industrial levels. In contrast, methane concentrations could be restored to pre-industrial levels by removing about 3.2 billion tons of the gas from the atmosphere and converting it into an amount of carbon dioxide equivalent to a few months of global industrial emissions, according to the researchers. If successful, the approach would eliminate approximately one-sixth of all causes of global warming to date.
Methane is challenging to capture from air because its concentration is so low. However, the authors point out that zeolite, a crystalline material that consists primarily of aluminum, silicon and oxygen, could act essentially as a sponge to soak up methane. “The porous molecular structure, relatively large surface area and ability to host copper and iron in zeolites make them promising catalysts for capturing methane and other gases,” said Ed Solomon, the Monroe E. Spaght Professor of Chemistry in the School of Humanities and Sciences.
The whole process might take the form of a giant contraption with electric fans forcing air through tumbling chambers or reactors full of powdered or pelletized zeolites and other catalysts. The trapped methane could then be heated to form and release carbon dioxide, the authors suggest.
The process of converting methane to carbon dioxide could be profitable with a price on carbon emissions or an appropriate policy. If market prices for carbon offsets rise to $500 or more per ton this century, as predicted by most relevant assessment models, each ton of methane removed from the atmosphere could be worth more than $12,000.
Ha! I might as well end on a positive note (NOT) about the state of journalism (NOT) in this country (sic). Oh, it’s so easy to hate the fake progressives and mushroomed-out conservative hippies of San Francisco. Oh, SF, what a rotten city, but I still love those citizens, for sure, who fight for something along the lines I have scatter shot mentioned above.
Adachi leak: San Francisco ransacks its values with police raid on reporter’s home — Kudos to two supervisors who have been among the few non-journalists to publicly call out the Police Department for its terrible behavior. Supervisor Aaron Peskin released a statement Wednesday slamming both the Police Department and the judges who gave the go-ahead to the raid.
“A free press is a fundamental pillar of our democracy and must be protected,” Peskin said. “The fact that the Superior Court nevertheless signed warrants authorizing police to conduct the raid on a journalist’s home and to confiscate their belongings boggles my mind.”
Supervisor Hillary Ronen said San Francisco progressives relish leaks from the Trump administration, which have been the basis for so many national stories putting the president in a negative light. But she added that means supporting local journalists’ rights to receive leaked information, too, even if it put Adachi, beloved by the city’s progressives, in a negative light.
“We cannot have it both ways,” Ronen said. “I am shocked that the judges in this case, the police chief, the mayor, that so many levels of government aren’t decrying this abuse of power. … Never in my wildest dreams did I think they would sledgehammer a journalist’s door and take all of his equipment. It’s an abuse of power, and I don’t know what’s going on here.”
You and me both, supervisor
I am feeling like that might happen to anyone, with a blog like this, or writing for other spaces, like my work over at Dissident Voice. Pound in my door out here in rural Oregon, have a couple of thugs dressed up as home invasion meth users. Have my body plugged full of holes as I defend as any good Che would my little abode while I am here writing and teaching. Ya think it can’t happen? That’s when things go haywire like, and, yes, I am nothing in the eyes of the capitalists. Nothing more than a tick!
Speaking of which — this is how perverse EVERYTHING about capitalism is, down to the fucking tick: Where Lyme Disease Came From and Why It Eludes Treatment by DAVID SWANSON
The outbreak of unusual tick-borne disease around Long Island Sound actually started in 1968, and it involved three diseases: Lyme arthritis, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, and babesiosis. A U.S. bioweapons scientist, Willy Burgdorfer, credited in 1982 with discovering the cause of Lyme disease, may have put the diseases into ticks 30 years earlier. And his report on the cause of Lyme disease may have involved a significant omission that has made it harder to diagnose or cure. The public focus on only one of the three diseases has allowed a disaster that could have been contained to become widespread.
Newby documents in detail Burgdorfer’s work for the U.S. government giving diseases to ticks in large quantities to be used as weapons, as they have been in Cuba in 1962, for example. “He was growing microbes inside ticks, having the ticks feed on animals, and then harvesting the microbes from the animals that exhibited the level of illness the military had requested.”
Burgdorfer published a paper in 1952 about the intentional infecting of ticks. In 2013, filmmaker Tim Grey asked him, on camera, whether the pathogen he had identified in 1982 as the cause of Lyme disease was the same one or similar or a generational mutation of the one he’d written about in 1952. Burgdorfer replied in the affirmative.
Interviewed by Newby, Burgdorfer described his efforts to create an illness that would be difficult to test for — knowledge of which he might have shared earlier with beneficial results for those suffering. Newby, who has herself suffered from Lyme disease, blames the profit interests of companies and the corruption of government for the poor handling of Lyme disease. But her writing suggests to me a possibility she doesn’t raise, namely that those who know where Lyme disease came from have avoided properly addressing it because of where it came from.
Newby assumes throughout the book that there has to have been a particular major incident near Long Island Sound, either an accident or an experiment on the public or an attack by a foreign nation. Burgdorfer reportedly claimed to another researcher that Russia stole U.S. bioweapons. Based on that and nothing else, Newby speculates that perhaps Russia attacked the United States with diseased ticks, coincidentally right in the location where the U.S. government experimented with diseased ticks.
“What this book brings to light,” Newby writes, “is that the U.S. military has conducted thousands of experiments exploring the use of ticks and tick-borne diseases as biological weapons, and in some cases, these agents escaped into the environment. The government needs to declassify the details of these open-air bioweapons tests so that we can begin to repair the damage these pathogens are inflicting on human and animals in the ecosystem.”
Well, let’s just keep moving on, back to the pigs of America, COPS. Just look at these idiots, and I have a right to call cops idiots because I worked as a reporter in several towns and states as a police beat print journalist, and, b, I have worked with them as a volunteer in K-9 outfits in Tucson, and, c, I have had many Criminal Justice (sic) majors in the many classes I have taught in the many cities from where I plied my trades. Look at these pigs:
Ahh, but this journalist, hmm, he has a past, too, and this might all be a smear of him by cops and, well, he is going to make out, I believe with this raid and arrest. America is full of sharks, full of snake oil salesmen and saleswomen. His lawyer makes out, and the reporters doing stories on the reporter (sic) make out. You think this Carmody will also make out, somehow. I have a suspicion, yes he will! First, from the Columbia Journalism Review:
BRYAN CARMODY, a freelance journalist in San Francisco, often works the night shift, shooting videos of car crashes, police chases, structure fires, and other breaking news events, and selling them in the morning to the Bay Area’s local television stations. So he was asleep at 8:20am on Friday when police officers started banging on his front gate with a sledgehammer. The officers had a warrant, and they handcuffed Carmody for five and a half hours while they searched his home and then his office, five miles away. They were looking, Carmody says, for the identity of an anonymous source who had given him a police report on the recent death of San Francisco Public Defender Jeff Adachi.
“They searched my house at gunpoint,” Carmody says. “They were running around like they were a SWAT team, even though they weren’t.”
This was an extraordinary step by San Francisco police, the first such raid of a journalist’s home or office that Carmody’s lawyer, Thomas Burke, can remember. Pressure to unmask anonymous sources is nothing new, nor are legal threats against government employees who leak documents. But police officers storming into a journalist’s home with their guns drawn is nearly unheard of, frowned upon by custom and statute.
“Search warrants for journalists are very, very rare,” Burke, a partner at Davis Wright Tremaine in San Francisco and a lecturer in media law at the University of California, Berkeley, Graduate School of Journalism, says. “They just don’t happen, and they shouldn’t happen.”
Adachi was the city’s public defender for 17 years and was a vocal advocate for police reform and the rights of the accused. His death at age 59—brought on, a medical examiner concluded, by a mixture of cocaine and alcohol—was a major story in San Francisco. There was no evidence of foul play, and no cocaine found at the apartment where he died. But the reports and photos taken by police at the scene, which were leaked to Carmody and aired on local news broadcasts, included references to “an unmade bed,” the woman Adachi was with, and cannabis gummies and alcohol found in the apartment.
Some people in the city, including freelancer Joe Kukura in SFist, thought police officers were trying to smear Adachi with the leak. Carmody says he won’t speculate about his source’s motives for leaking the report.
Carmody is well known and not particularly well liked by other Bay Area journalists. Not long after the news of the police raid hit Twitter, the Oakland-based journalist and illustrator Susie Cagle posted, “I blocked this guy several years ago because he used to constantly harass me. But this raid is no less outrageous.” Vivian Ho, a reporter with The San Francisco Chronicle from 2011 to 2017, echoed the sentiment, tweeting, “Bryan Carmody’s harassment of me and other reporters was repugnant and inexcusable, but so is this raid.” Other journalists replied with similar comments.
Cagle and Ho both say their unpleasant encounters with Carmody happened years ago, and neither saved any messages or screenshots of his comments. (Carmody has deleted his old tweets.) Both journalists say Carmody sent them insulting tweets after they were arrested while covering the Occupy Oakland protests in 2011 and 2012. Carmody also covered the Occupy Oakland protests. “He was particularly vile to me while I was covering Occupy in Oakland, where I was arrested twice while working, which he thought was great,” Cagle said in an interview conducted over Twitter direct messages.
Ho said her interactions with Carmody were similar.
“I covered a lot of protests. Anybody who didn’t appear staunchly pro-police in their coverage was somebody he harassed,” Ho said via direct messages. “I don’t remember the exact things he said to me, but it was something along the lines of when protestors hurt me, the police won’t help me.”
Asked about Ho’s recollections, Carmody says he was being “snarky,” and adds that he found Ho’s reporting to be reflexively anti-police. Still, he doesn’t dispute Ho’s recollection and says the comment about police not being there to protect her from protesters was “a true statement.”
Ho and Cagle both see irony in the fact that Carmody positioned himself as the pro-police journalist and then wound up with police raiding his home and newsroom. “If I were optimistic I would say maybe it would change his perspective on police and press freedom,” Cagle messaged. “But I’m not.”
Carmody says the incident hasn’t changed his outlook. He distinguishes between the department brass and internal affairs investigators, who were behind the raid, and the rank-and-file officers.
There it is, Tuesday’s USA! USA! USA! Will/Was Never Made Great Again insanity!
Oh, yeah, from Truthout! Imagine, all this writer is asking for are LABELS on glyphosate. Labels so when you want to kill weeds with a spray, you at least have a fucking warning. This is the state of America — let them spray carcinogens as long as there is a warning label on the side! Welcome cigarette USA. Welcome acceptable levels of death-creating toxins in the baby food. Welcome, Capitalism on Steroids. Monsanto’s Next Legal Battle Over Roundup Is in Its Hometown :
Elaine Stevick of Petaluma, California was supposed to be the next in line to take on Monsanto at trial.
But in his order of mediation, Judge Chhabria also vacated her May 20 trial date. A new trial date is to be discussed at the hearing on Wednesday.
Stevick and her husband Christopher Stevick sued Monsanto in April of 2016 and said in an interview that they are eager to get their chance to confront the company over the devastating damage they say Elaine’s use of Roundup has done to her health.
She was diagnosed in December 2014 at the age of 63 with multiple brain tumors due to a type of non-Hodgkin lymphoma called central nervous system lymphoma (CNSL). Alberta Pilliod, who just won the most recent trial, also had a CNSL brain tumor.
The couple purchased an old Victorian home and overgrown property in 1990 and while Christopher worked on renovating the interior of the house, Elaine’s job was to spray weed killer over the weeds and wild onions that the couple said took over a good portion of the property. She sprayed multiple times a year until she was diagnosed with cancer.
She never wore gloves or other protective clothing because believed it to be as safe as advertised, she said.
Stevick is currently in remission but nearly died at one point in her treatment, Christopher Stevick said.
“I called her the ‘queen of Roundup’ because she was always walking around spraying the stuff,” he told EHN.
The couple attended parts of both the Pilliod and Hardeman trials, and said they are grateful the truth about Monsanto’s actions to hide the risks are coming into the public spotlight. And they want to see Bayer and Monsanto start warning users about the cancer risks of Roundup and other glyphosate-based herbicides.
“We want the companies to take responsibility for warning people — even if there is a chance that something would be harmful or hazardous for them, people should be warned,” Elaine Stevick told EHN.
My oh my, the state of discourse and thinking in the USA. So, it’s okay that you spray my ditches with Agent Orange, or send out clouds of DDT into your yard which comes to my patio, or flood a wetland where I fish and kayak in, with Round-up AS LONG as there is a warning label on that product YOU use around MY house, MY physiology, MY activities, MY recreating, MY diet!
God, Americans are colonized with sheer fear and stupidity! The lack of logic spewing from journalists, academics, politicians, business owners, corporations, whew, like living at the end of a sewer discharge pipe!
If artists are the antennae of the race, and writers and thinkers are also artists, then a vibration some are receiving and beginning to transmit to the culture more broadly now is new in the history of our species: the world is dying.
— Christy Rodgers, “Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Grief, Acceptance: The Five Stages of Ecocide”
I’m digging what some of us artists are doing to act as narrative catchments, looking deep into the well of humanity’s general self-delusion and hubris. This is on the heels of heading from the Central Oregon Coast to Portland, to attend an Oceans conference at Portland State University in downtown Stumptown Sunday afternoon.
Patience here, dear reader, since I am also part of a grand global transformation, though time and again I have written over the decades that I get it and got it at a very young age —
capitalism as a system of penury, pollution, trickle down insanity
the rapacious quality of narcissism of the Western world (me-myself-and-I consumerism)
the despoiling of soil, land, air, river, ocean water by collective madness of money making
misogyny which has hitched the world’s girls and women to the shackles of male stupidity and sexual violence and forced birthing
war lords, even those hiding in Sweden or Switzerland, becoming the Mafioso of the world, full stop
the capturing of a free thinking press and evisceration of holistic education by privatizers and corporate overlords to create the Orwellian maxim of, lies are truth, war is peace
So, with my fiance and her daughter — OSU chemistry/physics undergraduate — we headed to a mild conference (tabling non-profits do not make a conference) to also listen to celebrity diver-scientist, Sylvia Earle, aged 83. We’ll talk about her Mission Blue. We’ll talk about this hopey-dopey thing she promulgates. We’ll talk about her down-dumbing to audiences. Later. And I paid for tickets, which is something I have rarely done in my 62 years on the planet.
In the water, Earle
Yes, the guilt of using up fossil fuels, clogging the road system and sending water vapor and CO2 into the atmosphere to hear someone I have already heard elsewhere in another iteration of my time as community college teacher and sustainability leader.
How difficult was it for me to NOT open my mouth and start railing against this celebrity culture before the talk — and expose a 21-year-old hopeful undergraduate science student to negativity — and then spew out my prophecy of . . . this is just going to be another white person-attended milquetoast thing with dyed in the wool democrats and Obama lovers again not even attempting to stammer that capitalism is the evil, war is the tool for this evil, magical thinking is the conduit of this evil, and chaos in all forms of discourse/thought/ community its product?
Huge!
I’ll in a future piece nuance and dice and parse what Sylvia Earle’s talk was — a refitted talk that she’s done for decades — and how that crowd in Portland did in some sense send pulsating streams of bile into my throat as I felt like the one and only one who was disturbed by the lock-step cult of celebrity thing going on in that big PSA pavilion, one big basketball arena that was burping up so much air conditioned streams that dozens of folk scurried around looking for sweaters and coats to keep from blue-lipping themselves into a stupor.
I’ve been here before, running talks with the likes of Winona LaDuke, James Howard Kunstler, David Helvarg, Bill McKibben and others. I was the thorn in the side, the lightning rod, the agitator, the one person who took the discourse away from slanted academic or literary bunk and platitudes, toward a more militant rhetoric, one where revolutionary thinking had to set the stage. Some guests were uncomfortable, and audiences, too but many speakers and others I interviewed or MC-ed for responded deeper than they had ever in public, many have told me. I even took them to the studio and interviewed them on my old radio show. Here are a few captured on my blog, PaulHaeder dot com.
Too-too many times, the rank and file wherever I practiced as teacher, journalist, social worker and activist have demonstrated their partial or complete colonization (where I ticked off the issues in the list above) which has assisted in depositing magical thinking and elitism and exceptionalism into the very fiber of the average American. Including many of the people who I rub elbows with!
The stage was set, Sunday, and we were there, a few hundred captives, held to the standards of this organization that sponsored the event — SAGE, Senior Advocates for Generational Equity. There was a choir, and there was a forced “all audience members please stand up and sing” moment, Hallelujah’s, and there were no young people on stage, no haggling of ideas, no argumentation about how criminal capitalism is, and our war economy (Earle is a capitalist and military supporter), no debate about how we do in fact help save the ocean, no hard-edged and outside-the-box discourse and presentation.
This is not normal, but now the new normal
As she spoke May 19, the headlines were hurtling in, headlines that would have made some good grist for deep conversation:
Mercury levels in the northern Pacific Ocean have risen about 30 percent over the past 20 years and are expected to rise by 50 percent more by 2050 as industrial mercury emissions increase, according to a 2009 study led by researchers at the U.S. Geological Survey and Harvard University.
Mercury-containing plants and tiny animals are eaten by smaller fish that are then gobbled up by larger fish, whose tissue accumulates mercury. That’s why larger, longer-living predators such as sharks and swordfish tend to have more of the toxin than smaller fish such as sardines, sole, and trout.
In comments submitted to federal health officials earlier this year, a group of scientists and policy analysts pointed out that a 6-ounce serving of salmon contains about 4 micrograms of mercury vs. 60 micrograms for the same portion of canned albacore tuna—and 170 micrograms for swordfish.
When you eat seafood containing methylmercury, more than 95 percent is absorbed, passing into your bloodstream. It can move throughout your body, where it can penetrate cells in any tissue or organ.
W. Eugene Smith, mercury poisoning, Japan
But again, this is the cult of celebrity, even scientists, and so the evening was suffused with homilies and genuflecting and really a sixth grade level Power Point talk, not scientific, not political, not deep, not philosophical, not earth rumbling/shattering. Imagine those headlines above debated in the talk. The contradictions. The implications. Mercury, right, perfect for baby and grandpa!
Dolphins dying off Peru
So, the trip back through Oregon’s hinterland — farms, orchards, big hay operations — with all those “Jesus is the Way” billboard signs, all those “Trump and God Reign” fluttering flags, all that once-thick-forestland-turned-into-Johnson-grass property, all those RVs and heavy-duty pickups and SUVs rushing for a week at the beach, and all the cannabis shops and junk food shacks reminding me that most people did not make THIS bargain two or three generations ago.
The cancer is capitalism-addictive-consumerism; the tuberculosis is the credit cards, banks, IMF, World Bank, and mortgage companies holding people on their knees with a debt gun to our heads; the neurological damage is the assault on democracy through the prostitution of politicians-journalists-educators in that old time religion, careerism; the illiteracy is through the ever-deadening death-entertainment of a floundering press and piss poor publishing realm.
Much on that — the concept of a Sylvia Earle even headlining a “world oceans day” anemic event — and the obvious lack of hard-hitting discourse and thought on a beautiful Sunday afternoon. .
Below is a piece I wrote, specifically for Oregon Humanities magazine, a call out for manuscripts to work with the theme, adapt.
For the Summer 2019 issue, share an experience about conforming in response to some sort of pressure. Tell us what it takes to alter and revamp a system that needs to change. Explore a historical or current event that shows the process and outcome of adaptation.
No, this isn’t an angst riddled preface to the piece that was NOT accepted for publication, which also would have had a small check involved. I was told by the poet laureate of Oregon (K.S.) to not expect a big huge hug when sending in my submission, implying that the staff — editorial people at this non-profit, Oregon Humanities — have their own little dance to the beat of a different literary drummer thing going on.
I get that, these non-profits staffed by some pretty middle of the road peeps, or culture wars warriors, or people who have a set and proscribed middle land of what they believe is music to their ears or what would be acceptable stuff for their funders’ and readers’ sensibilities.
Therefore, the rejection letter I got yesterday, via email, with a couple of typos in the body written by the editor of this magazine, was expected, but like anytime I attempt a corn-artichoke-green chile-vegan cheese souffle — and it’s definitely putting in all that energy, using all those well-handled ingredients, shepherding all the care and the oven acumen — when the souffle comes out floppy or semi-deflated, my hardened heart still skips a few beats and I want to kick the cast iron ceramic pot into the woods hissing and steaming.
Same with a rejection letter! Err, make that plural. Dozens of them. In the hundreds. Even after 45 years of rejections, I feel the bile bubble up! Then I remember how much I hated that masters of fine arts group of people I have intellectually intercoursed with over the years!
There is good writing out there, just not much of it coming from MFA programs. What may have provided an engine for a genuine attention to craft, fifty years ago, Rockefeller Foundation notwithstanding, has withered and left an enfeebled cult of pseudo expertise. For the genetic disposition of creative writing programs is linked to the paradoxical stigmatizing and entitlements of University attendance. The goal of the CIA and State Dept is one thing, and we’re talking less than best and brightest here, and the ideological imprint is actually probably minor, but the unintended vaccinations of rationality, the ingesting of sociological and a generic lexical sensibility is significant. Art that has lost anger and moral obsession, has left a low stakes hobby culture of career minded ruthlessness coupled to creative flaccidity. The work is constrained in the same ways, psychologically, that allows mute absorption of all aspects of the Spectacle. The concrete and specific becomes generic by a rational process of observation that brackets the irrational and working within the institution is a tacit acceptance of the hierarchies of the system that desires to kill off dissent and opposition, and that means killing off the impulse to question. The white supremacist establishment shares the structural dynamics of the University. MFA program as Pentagon. Now there are exceptions, I guess. But creative writing largely, following the lead of the Iowa Writers Workshop is in the business of staying in business. — John Steppling
&
The compulsive repetitive nature of mass marketing has gone a long ways in the training of perception. But it is the mystifying of repetition, the pretense is of difference. And this seems crucial. The liberal white class, the people who run institutional theater, and University programs in writing, believe largely in a marketed reality within which stories of individualism can be played out. Clear cut the forest, the better to inspect ‘psychology’ as it is operative in each ‘character’. This links also to my last post and this idea of mastery. You cannot master the forest, without mostly cutting it down. The sense of space: that theatrical space, linked to an ‘off stage’, to an elsewhere that is unconscious, is by its very nature submissive. The submission allows for that walk in the forest. That walk is creative and it also the discovery of a path. The Situationists used to say, get a map of Berlin and use it to navigate yourself around Milan. — John Steppling
She covers the so-called stages of grief — Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Grief, Acceptance — as we collectively and individually confront the great dying, and confront all those feedback loops and lag times and tipping points to our rape of the world as they are now being played out as the chickens coming home to roost. Fricken Chaucer: Some six centuries ago, when Geoffrey used it in The Parson’s Tale:
And ofte tyme swich cursynge wrongfully retorneth agayn to hym that curseth, as a bryd that retorneth agayn to his owene nest.
Rodgers is talking about this climate warming chaos, the stages of grief, confronting what in our lifetimes is the most dramatic event civilization has spurred and will ever witness. She is part of an artist collective, Dark Mountain, and she is prefacing the latest anthology by talking about the deep remnants of human pain during this bearing witness and bearing the weight and cause of the quickening of species extinction and the betrayal of all those goods and services capitalism and other forms of rendering civilization put into the equation of take or give.
Dark Mountain’s latest anthology, #15, In the Age of Fire, has just been published. Material from its 51 authors and artists is showcased on the project’s website. Rodgers, DV:
Acceptance doesn’t mean accommodation with oppression and injustice. It means acknowledgment that we aren’t trying to prevent the apocalypse, because civilization is the apocalypse. We are trying to open a path to a future that is worth living in. Our feelings are experienced individually, and they do not directly impact the material world. But they are not irrelevant. The path to truth for a complex being must itself be complex. On the day a hundred thousand people come into the streets to grieve together for the lost reefs, the lost forests, and all the unnumbered victims, human and non-human, of civilization’s rise, we can mark the beginning of a new era in human life on this planet.
At the Brink of Extinction on the Coast Near the Salmon River
To see a world in a grain of sand, And a heaven in a wild flower, Hold infinity in the palm of your hand, And eternity in an hour.
A crossroads is the big X in my life, like the symbol of the thunderbird in many myths of original peoples of the American Pacific Northwest, Southwest, East Coast, Great Lakes, and Great Plains.
Of all the places I now am rooted in and adapting to — the Central Oregon Coast — I am thinking long and hard about what it means to have traveled through body, soul and mind in a 62-year-old journey.
I’m thinking about how I ended up in Otis, near Cascade Head on the Pacific. From birth in San Pedro, California, upbringing in the Azores, formative years in Paris, France, and learning teenage years in the Sonora, from Arizona to Guaymas, I am here reinvigorating what many elders I’ve crossed paths with as adopted vision quest instructors have taught me.
When you are ready, come to me. I will take you into nature. In nature you will learn everything that you need to know. – Rolling Thunder, Cherokee Medicine Man
I was told that very lesson by friends’ dads and aunties from so many tribes – Papago, Chiricahua and White River Apache, Navajo, Yaqui, Tohono O’odham. Even at the bottom of the Barrancas del Cobre, several Tarahumara elders imparted the same wisdom: In nature you will learn everything you need.
I received the same tutelage in Vietnam by ethnic tribes leaders near the Laos border 25 years ago. And I learned the same points in my life six years ago on the Island of St. John from a turtle hunter who had grown up in Dominica.
Ironically, just a few days when I was welcoming 2019 into my life, I received the same sort of holistic “how to live in harmony” message from a social worker friend who is also an enrolled member of the Grande Ronde tribe. He texted me this:
“I chatter, chatter as I flow to join the brimming river, for men may come and men may go, but I go on forever.”
This from a tribal elder who I worked with on independent living programs for foster youth. One of our clients was from the Grande Ronde tribe living in Clackamas County, Oregon, receiving services for developmental disabilities caused by fetal alcohol syndrome.
My former colleague waited five minutes before a follow-up text came to me: “Bro’, that’s from Lord Tennyson, so don’t go all Dances with Wolves on me, man . . . haha.”
That text came to me while I was solitary, across from a sand spit where 20 harbor seals were banana-splitting in their favorite haul-out near Cascade Head, where the Salmon River pushes out freshwater ions, tannins, soil streams into the Pacific just north of Lincoln City.
The pinnipeds were cool, but listless. Instead, I was busy espying two bald eagles swooping down on the sand a hundred yards from the seals who then began pecking and ripping at a pretty good-sized steel-head carcass.
The moment before the incoming tide shifted hard and was about to isolate me on a lone rocky outcropping, I was thinking like a mountain, sort of – at least I was deep in the afterglow of having just reread Aldo Leopold’s ASand Country Almanac:
A deep chesty bawl echoes from rimrock to rimrock, rolls down the mountain, and fades into the far blackness of the night. It is an outburst of wild defiant sorrow, and of contempt for all the adversities of the world.
Every living thing (and perhaps many a dead one as well) pays heed to that call. To the deer it is a reminder of the way of all flesh, to the pine a forecast of midnight scuffles and of blood upon the snow, to the coyote a promise of gleanings to come, to the cowman a threat of red ink at the bank, to the hunter a challenge of fang against bullet. Yet behind these obvious and immediate hopes and fears there lies a deeper meaning, known only to the mountain itself. Only the mountain has lived long enough to listen objectively to the howl of a wolf. – Thinking like a Mountain, Aldo Leopold
How did I get here, Oregon’s Central Coast? How did I end up learning about eagles pecking at the afterbirth of sea lions in and around the rookeries here on this coast? Why is the eagle, a talisman for me since my early years traveling throughout the American Southwest and into Mexico, so important to me now?
Adaptation or extinction, change versus stagnation. For so many reasons, change and evolution have been part and parcel of my life – newspaper journalist, novelist, college professor, case manager for adults with disabilities, social worker for homeless veterans, and a million more intersections in a world of apparent chaos.
The Mexican flag of those Estados Unidos Mexicanos is an eagle on a prickly pear cactus with a snake in its mouth. I learned as a high school junior that the ancient Aztecs knew where to build their city Tenochtitlan once they saw an eagle eating a snake on top of a lake.
The beauty of the American eagle adapting to the toxins in DDT is clear: Homo Sapiens seems historically to never employ the precautionary principle for both ourselves as a species and others in the ecosphere when creating and dispersing new powerful technologies and chemicals.
All of this was coursing through my mind as a scampered across large sloughed-off rocks and boulders where the Pacific was now tangling with the Salmon River.
Eagles there dining on entrails and then in my memory cave, like a magical realism moment, other eagle quests flooded my memory – and I was there, in the now, with a river otter toying with me just offshore, and then studying that tidal estuary, hoping to keep my Timberlines dry, ruminating about age, and all the adaptations I’ve made easily and also kicking and screaming, yelling, “No more change . . . no more upheaval.” Like Don Quixote in Man of La Mancha:
When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? Perhaps to be too practical is madness. To surrender dreams — this may be madness. Too much sanity may be madness — and maddest of all: to see life as it is, and not as it should be!
Another one of my muses, Gabriel Garcia Marquez then came into focus while those eagles were picking apart muscles of the steel-head and then clouds only this part of the Pacific can incubate started swirling above me on cue —
He was still too young to know that the heart’s memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and that thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera
I am still waylaid by that concept, eliminating the bad [to] magnify the good. I am coursing through understanding myself in this walkabout, here in Otis, not exactly the center of anyone’s universe. But then, the nagging Marquez again, and a quote I used to deploy to students in El Paso to think beyond their false hopes: “He who awaits much can expect little.”
I have lived most of my life working with the so-called “bad” — disenfranchised and economically strafed people, those with substance abuse challenges both mocked and misunderstood, and those not on the neural normal scale – assisting them to adapt to their own hard histories and epigenetic bad cards dealt to be self-enhancing people.
There seems to always an eagle overhead when I am going deep into the recesses of memory. In Spokane when I was with a battle-scarred veteran friend who was at a cemetery ready to commit suicide. When I put my sister’s ashes into the sea near Hyder, Alaska. The moment I was called in Vancouver when my brother-in-law died.
Then, it hit me while driving away from Cascade Head — those eagles have been my talismans for six bloody decades! The words of writers, from the minds of people like Louise Erdrich or Jorge Luis Borges, or way back to Beowulf, and farther back to Muhammad al Tulmusani, are also my talismans of sort, but the eagle has been my vision quest. Not the brown eagle of the Aztec incubation, but the bald eagle.
These galvanizing moments are serious times of not just reflection, but ruminating and cultivating change. Adapting.
My father said when I was born in 1957, several bald eagles from Catalina Island were spotted near the San Pedro hospital where I was delivered — Little Company of Mary Hospital.
Here, 62 years later, I now have the sense to take that “sign” to my grave – bald eagle vision quest.
I’m thinking about 36 million years ago, when the first eagles descended from the kite line. I’m thinking reptiles, and 66 million years ago when birds evolved from the lizards. Looking at the ocean broiling up in Whale Cove will do that to the mind.
Millions of years of adaptations, brother, sister, eagle, and then Thoreau ends up dredging from me a fractal of thought every single day in this tidal wetlands as tides in and tides out signal climatic climaxes yet to come: “Wildness is the preservation of the World.”
Adaptations for this American symbol, Haliaeetus leucocephalus — as the continual use of DDT (and other pesticides) spread throughout the country — was a world of constant trials and tribulations. And near extinction.
From 1917 to 1953, the “adaptation” of Alaskan human salmon fishers to an abundance of salmon was to harvest more and more runs, intentionally killing more than 100,000 bald eagles as a threat to “their” catches.
The lack of adaptive abilities of a species like the bald eagle when faced with the unnatural distillations of chemicals by humanity should have hit us hard fifty years ago: birds that weigh in at 10 to 14 pounds, with wingspans of up to 8 feet, having strength and agility to pull salmon out of the sea while underwater themselves, and a lifespan of up to 30 or more years in the wild can’t weather man-made toxins.
If the 36-million-old eagle can’t make it under the assault of better living through chemistry , then it’s easy to understand humanity’s lack of adaptive skills (how many short years of evolution have we been messing with our adaptations?) to stop business-as-usual industrial and lifestyle processes like spraying DDT. We too are now experiments in the grand cauldron of chemicals produced and released daily.
The effects of that process of humanity “adapting” their environment to their needs — industrial agriculture demanding insect-free habitats with these pesticides that Rachel Carson, mother of the environmental movement, discussed in her 1962 book, Silent Spring — was the near extirpation of the American symbol of strength, power, independence and persistence!
Haliaeetus leucocephalus, from Greek, sea, hals and eagle, aietos and white-head, leukos kephalē !
Recall from our Baby-Boomer high school biology books — DDT and other pesticides spread like a slow-motion tsunami across America, sprayed on plants and then eaten by small animals, which were later consumed by birds of prey. Today, we call it bio-accumulation. That poison did its dark magic “art” on both adult bald eagles and their eggs. The egg shells became too thin to withstand the 36-day incubation period, often crushed under the weight of one of the parents.
Again, what I learned in the 1970s as a high schooler – eagle eggs that were not crushed during brooding mostly did not hatch due to high levels of DDT and its derivatives. Large quantities of PCBs and DDT ended up in fatty tissues and gonads. The maladaptation of the eagle to pesticides was to become infertile due to man’s maladaptation, or in the case of Homo Sapiens, the rearrangement of ecosystems and organic pathways.
That was me in Tucson, Arizona, scrambling through desert ‘scapes. I was junior in high school when DDT was officially banned in 1972, largely due to Rachel’s amazing book and petitioning. That was eight years after she had died (Apr 14, 1964) at age 56 from cancer (many attribute breast cancer to the poisons of her time).
Eagles were listed in 1967 as endangered on one listing and then later, 1972, nationally through the Endangered Species Act.
I remember eagles as brothers and myth carriers from many of my buddies who were Navajo, Zuni, Apache and Hopi. Their mothers and uncles would tell us many stories about eagles. I remember traveling to El Paso for a wrestling match and seeing the Thunderbird burned millions of years ago into the Franklin Mountain range. This amazing natural formation of red clay on the mountainside, watching over the Chihuahua desert, captured me then, and later when I was a reporter and teacher in that part of the world.
I was touched then as 17-year-old wrestler visiting a place where a huge eagle to me (thunderbird), was there with outstretched wings and head tilted to the side as if protecting us all from predators, who I knew even at that age were us, Homo Sapiens.
My old stomping grounds and neighborhood, El Paso, Franklin Mountains, Red Thunderbird reminding me of my place in the world
Ten years later and for two decades I was there at that sacred place, a mountain along the Paseo del Norte, straddling Juarez, El Paso and New Mexico. In the 1990s developers were wanting to move (bulldoze) more and more up Thunderbird Mountain for more and more eyesores, AKA tract home subdivisions. Writers and artists on both sides of the border came together to not only stop that sort of desecration, but also to stem the tide of pollutants in the Rio Grande and the denuding of the fragile Chihuahua Desert.
On one of our 10- foot wide protest banners we held along the US-Mexico border, the bald eagle was painted on large and brilliantly, as a symbol of resistance and a “comeback kid story” because man’s chemicals were banned. For many thousands living and working in Juarez, their offspring came out stillborn or with anencephaly – parts of its brain and skull missing. Those industrial chemicals from the American-owned twin plants have not been banned.
Proof of Homo Sapiens’ chemicals prompting maladaptation in our offspring.
So, here I am in Otis, Oregon, thinking about that El Paso Thunderbird while watching the estuary bring in swamp-creating waters from the Pacific. What does it mean that I am adapting now in Otis, the town that was up for sale in 1999 for $3 million. That’s 193 acres (another auction occurred in 2004). I have coffee at the quasi-famous Otis Café which was not part of the town’s auction (it never got bought). The café owner’s grandfather bought the land from descendants of the Siletz Indians for $800 in 1910.
As a direct result of the DDT ban, on June 28, 2007 the Department of Interior took the American bald eagle off the Federal List of Endangered and Threatened Species.
The reality of putting the bald eagle in peril, and then its eventual recovery and broad habitat colonization means that they are seasonal residents near Yaquina Head. Eagles are like those proverbial human Snow Bird residents of Oregon who end up in Arizona or Nevada or even Hawaii to get the chill of Pacific rain forest winter out of their bones – they go where the living is best.
Here is the adaptation for the eagle – they go into the rookery of the murres, which have a major nesting colony at Yaquina Head. The eagle swooping in and taking the occasional adult murre isn’t the problem, scientists point out.
It’s the encroachment of “secondary predators” that is having a negative impact on the murres’ reproductive success.
An adult eagle is expert at swooping in and grabbing an adult murre and flying off. That’s not putting the murre species in peril. It’s the crummy hunter juvenile bald eagles who end up landing on the rookery. All the adult murres then scatter into the air.
That door then opens for brown pelicans and gulls to alight and grab eggs or murre chicks. These secondary predators will destroy hundreds of eggs in minutes.
Adaptation and re-adaptation.
Ahh, out of balance, and, alas, eagles are dying again in Washington state — lead poisoning, and more pollution.
Ecosystems out of balance, and now in Otis, I am adapting to the reality of the human footprint; even a small one like mine, is significant to each and every micro-biodome I come in contact with.
Soon, maybe, the eagle will be put on the hit list, and they too will feel the hard impact of game wardens’ bullets taking them out because, again, adaptation for the bald eagle means things get more and more out of balance.
Murres or eagles? People or salmon? Crab cakes or whales?
The weight of place, and being one with geographic and ecologic time always culls my disparate attempts at calm and inner self exploration. Otis, the Pacific, the entire riot that encompasses rowdy sea lions and the humpback’s 12-foot blowhole sprays, all those murres and double-crested cormorants, petrels dive bombing, black oystercatchers waddling at the tide lines, now are gestating into entire “memory palaces” for me. I think of my place alive in the world. The mutable feast of learning in my walkabout is a continual journey of adapting.
I am looking at an amazing gift of words, and from the Oregon Humanities Magazine, a serendipitous parallel moment for me and the works of Melissa Madenski, who in her essay is talking about this same geographic arena, where she’s lived for more than four decades and just recently left. She talks about spruce, alder, hemlock and maple and their powerful bio-nets and biological relationships through their interconnected forests of roots they share:
Unlike me, they don’t question or worry—that is the wisdom I project on them at least—a symbol for acceptance of what is. I’m coming to believe in my own memory palace that lives in my roots and the roots of my children, a stability that remains even as visible markers disappear. Look at the big picture, I tell myself. You got to live here for over half of your life; your children were able to grow up here; you got to love the land and leave good soil. – “Unclaiming the Land” (February 26, 2018)
Today, I foist my emotional and spiritual rucksack loaded up with my own learning and traveling as I engage with Otis, the Central Oregon Coast, and the people and cetaceans, alike, a repository for my next learning, my new series of adaptations. The bald eagle for all its battles and all the mythological connections, is my talisman and vision quest.
But I feel like that Zuni Eagle Boy who came upon an eaglet that had fallen out of the nest. The boy hunted for the eagle, foregoing working in the fields while the rest of his clan worked and worked.
His brothers resented the boy for raising this chick, who got big and healthy, big enough to fly away. But the eagle stayed with the boy. The clan was ready to kill the eagle to get the boy back, returned to the fields to grow corn and squash.
The boy saw that the eagle was downtrodden in his cage, and asked why. The eagle said he had grown to love the boy for saving him and raising him but had to leave so the boy could go back to his duties and be a boy with his people.
The boy wanted to leave with the eagle, and finally the eagle succumbed to the boy’s pleas.
The eagle told the boy to fill pouches with dried meats and fruit and blue corn bread and to put two bells on the eagle’s feet. The boy climbed on the eagle’s back and they flew off. They ended up in Sky Land, in the city with thousands of eagles who looked like people when they took off their wings and clothing of feathers when they entered their homes. The boy received wings and feather clothing.
As in many stories of rite of passage and adaptation by Native tribes, the Eagle Boy disobeyed the orders of the Eagles to not go south, and once the boy did, he thought it was a beautiful and safe place. Until people of bones – skeletons – chased him.
He made it back to Sky Land, but he was not welcome there for disobeying. Finally, the eagle that the boy had raised said he’d help him fly back to his people. The boy took an old cloak of feathers and made the arduous journey back. His friend the eagle circled above him the entire way to make sure he made it safe, and once Eagle Boy landed, the eagle took the cloak of feathers and flew away.
The Eagle Boy lived with his people, who honored him because they knew that Eagle Boy wanted to be with his people, even though he could fly away at any time.
Like Eagle Boy, I look to the skies and smile at the eagle’s graceful and wide veronicas as thermals take them up where humans can’t see clearly. The boy adapted and loved his people, even though the journey to the Sky Land was always with him and in his stories of adventure.
I am here, looking for my own Sky Land, but cognizant of the fact the love of my clan – family, fiancé, daughter, friends – is the uplift I count on to make it through the every-changing evolution of my mind and body. I can be an eagle on the ground, scampering through gravity-fed fields, hoping to understand how I might lay claim to finally understanding what all the adaptations mean in a life so lived.
Journalist/Educator Ends up Putting Roots Down in one of the Mossy Parts of Oregon
It is hoped that the coming generation will recognize
that that is probably one of the greatest and most ennobling challenges
that face man on this planet today. To be able to break through to
understand the thinking, the feeling, the doing, the talking of another
species is a grand, noble achievement that will change man’s view of
himself and of his planet.
Seventy-one percent of the surface of our planet is covered with
oceans, inhabited by the Cetacea. Let us learn to live in harmony with
that seventy-one percent of the planet and its intelligent, sensitive,
sensible, and long- surviving species of dolphins, whales, and
porpoises.
— John C. Lilly, adapted from the Introduction to Communication Between Man and Dolphin
Note: I was asked to write a couple of articles for the Oregon American Cetacean Society’s, Flukeprints,
as a way to help the non-profit group publicize and celebrate the
reasons many of us are in the whale protection racket. I ust became a
member of ACS, after 4.5 decades first joining ACS in Tucson, Arizona,
when I pitched an idea to get jojoba oil (a desert plant) to replace
whale oils for fine machinery. Sort of Save the Whales with the Desert
campaign.
This is 2019, and like many who were influenced by their diving experiences, and possibly the Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau TV
documentaries, I got my first rocket fins and US Divers and Scuba-Pro
gear at a young age — 14. Luckily, my mother had confidence in me going
to Mexico — Sea of Cortez — from our home in Tucson, Arizona, about a
four and a half hour trip to San Carlos where boats were awaiting divers
to hit what Cousteau once called “the aquarium of the world” — the Sea
of Cortez.
There was no question that I would act in a pretty moderating fashion
during some reckless situations, and for many years, I ended up getting
to know some incredible places underwater where I communed with nature,
including whales, dolphins, sharks and myriad of reef and open water
fish and invertebrates and turtles.
That was, gulp, 48 years ago. Imagine, almost half a century, and I
was on reefs that today are not just shadows of themselves, but slashed
and burned remnants, in some cases. Humanity’s voracious appetite for
marine flesh, and destructive netting and trolling techniques, as well
as over-capacity fishing fleets have put a big hole in what once was
like diving on another planet, the undersea world of vibrant everything!
A riot of colors, explosions of so many varied swimming and
propulsion techniques. This was pretty heady stuff for a kid who then
ended up diving for sometime after that, around parts of the world, as
an adult, dive bum.
Yes, I was an anti-whaling dude in Arizona. Yes, I protested Sea
World. Yes, I was up on all the destructive fishing and harvesting
techniques deployed in capitalism’s dog eat dog methods of killing the
planet.
I was quickly steeled, young, to not only fight for environmental
justice, but hand in hand, I was there with local people, fishers, and
then got a huge interest in social justice, indigenous rights, La Raza,
anti-imperialism. I studied the Seri Indians who live in Sonora, and
utilized the bountiful sea for their livelihoods and cultural identity.
It all made sense to me back then, 1977, and, hell, here we are,
2019, and each and every fear about how wrong Capitalism is, and every
one of the social justice causes I connected with in 1977 have all been
nightmares that came true, exploding on the world stage as I hit 62.
The whales are dying now in large numbers, because of starvation,
because of pollutants, because of plastics, because of noise pollution.
Dolphins dying in the Gulf of Mexico, now, in numbers old time fishermen
have never recalled. Whales washing up on the Pacific shores here, all
along the coast. Emaciated, and the end result will be more scientists
spending countless hours and lab time to try and come up with a cause, a
cause we in the movement who have been around this system can tie to
the absolute impregnation into the ocean of sounds, battering vessels,
oil slicks, pig shit coming from Mississippi to the Gulf Coast.
Acidification causing whales’ food stream to wither up.
This is a piss poor way to preface a pretty innocuous piece I wrote
for the American Cetacean Society, but alas, we live in magical thinking
times, where bad news and more bad news have to be shunted away with
feel-good beliefs that things will get better. Reality is fake, and fake
is reality in colonized North America. The roots of this absurdity go
back to Puritans, seeping into each wave of more illegal aliens who
populated this once wondrous land pushing diseased ideas, pathogens and
religion onto First Nations.
Now, we have many dozens generations later people who can’t think, can’t act and can’t argue critically out of a wet paper bag.
There is absolutely no historical or empirical evidence things will
(or have been getting) get better under the perversions of capitalism,
consumerism, war economics, as the battering rams of the elite and rich
and corporations shunt our money and labor into their pockets while all
infrastructure and ecological systems are failing.
So, can a rock that stays put not collect moss? Is this enough, a
small cathartic essay about my new home here on the Central Coast of
Oregon? What value does it have in the scheme of things?
All of these spasms up in the early light of morning, today. What can
we do with a 24/7 nanosecond by nanosecond world of distractions? What
do we do with children and adults who are galvanized to an operating
system where lies are truth, war is peace, as this culture — and others
willing to be infected by our media, our culture — is coopted by the
masters of the universe controlling media, education, law, finance,
technology, business, the arts. John Steppling on dream and skin-ego, in
his latest essay, Screen Dream:
The ruling class get to make movies. They get jobs in TV,
too. And with a CIA advisor in nearly every story conference and
writer’s room in Hollywood, the state has effectively and directly taken
over a huge chunk of the culture. Hollywood film and TV is controlled
by the children of the rich and very rich. Nobody has any taste, any
real education, and most are egregiously ignorant of the world around
them, and hence all the more susceptible to influence coming directing
from U.S. intelligence agencies and the state department.
Recently Leo DeCaprio, Keanu Reaves, and a dozen other *stars* (not
sure Keanu is a star anymore) clamored to get the opportunity to meet
Bibi Netanyahu. Why? Same reason they would fawn over any (ANY) five
star general or military killer. The adulation for uniforms and
authority is in the open, now. Killers are proud of what they do and the
celebrity A-List is intoxicated with this power.
[…]
Whatever the implications of our relationship with various
technologies, it is clear, I think, that capital and class are encoded
throughout and that the logic of instrumental reason has become the
logic of our unconscious. Like it or not. Aesthetic resistance is one
way to break the endless loops of compulsion and the deadening of
thought and feeling.
Bearing Witness in a World Upside Down and With Whales Washing up Dead On Arrival
It is this sense of tranquility, of life without urgency,
power without aggression, that has won my heart to whales … whales
offer to human beings a lesson. They demonstrate to us that our ancient
and ignorant belief in the inherent supremacy of our species over all
others is utterly wrong.
One of the benefits of not setting down too many roots is the luxury
of traveling to many parts of the USA and the globe. I guess the Oregon
coast is yet another landing post for me in my journey.
I moved to Otis, Oregon, Dec. 2018, after working as a social worker
for homeless veterans and their families in Portland/Beaverton. One of
the first things I did when I got to Otis was to do a hike along the
Cascade Head trail and then hit the beach near Three Rocks to hang out
with a pair of bald eagles and harbor seals.
I’ve pretty much hit all the popular beaches on the Central Oregon
Coast with my fiancé. Nothing gets old, and I discover new things about
me each time out.
On one of those forays, I ventured out one night in late January, ending up at the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology
for a public gathering to welcome the five new residency recipients,
including filmmaker, print maker, photographer, writer, and whale expert
Fred Sharpe, PhD.
He has 25 years under his weight belt and scientist’s cap studying
the behavior of humpback whales. His specialty is on the bubble-netting
proclivity of Alaskan humpbacks. He looks at the connections of this
ecotype’s behavior as signals of enduring bonds, complicated task
specializations, team hunting and communal tool use.
He has a team that follows the humpbacks south to their wintering
haunts in the Hawaiian Islands. They’ve been looking at the historical
ecology of north Polynesian cetaceans for years. In addition, his work
has garnered awards including the Fairfield Award for Innovative Marine
Mammal Research and the Society for Marine Mammology’s Award for
Excellence in Scientific Communication.
I talked with Fred at the Sitka over beer and cheese and crackers. In
fact, he got the residency at the Sitka as part of his research on
native strands of alder along the Oregon Coast. He is interested in
native grasses, too, along beachheads. That interest as a nature lover
and researcher-he considers himself a naturalist in the classical
tradition-has led him to be a co-author and illustrator of Wild Plants of the San Juan Islands, Birding in the San Juan Islands, and Voyaging with the Whales.
The more nitty-gritty work Fred does is centered on his position with the Alaska Whale Foundation as a principal investigator, as well as being a Wilderness First Responder.
He has volunteered as a large whale disentangler with NOAA’s Alaska Stranding Network.
The Sitka Center for Art and Ecology was founded 49 years ago, the
same year Earth Day started, ironically. That mission has stayed the
same: “Helping others discover more about their core creative selves and
their connections to nature.” The new term, relatively speaking, in
environmental circles, is intersectionality: looking at the environment
and gender and race and poverty and how all reflect and tie into
each other, for instance.
For the Sitka Center, a naturalist like Sharpe embodies Sitka’s goal
of “expanding the relationships between art, nature and humanity.”
My own recent evolving and expanding philosophy and life experience recognition tied to my writing (poetry, nonfiction, fiction) and nature (marine biology, ecology) and humanity (education and cultural competence) came to me on the Central Oregon Coast during the American Cetacean Society’s Naturalist training program, headed up by Joy Primrose. I was with a cohort of around 20 naturalist-wannabes at the Newport library diving into the complexities of the natural world as it pertains to cetaceans, pinnipeds, seabirds and other ocean ecological niches. We graduated with flying colors, and were awarded our certificates during the Bill Hanshumaker talk I’ve written about in this issue of Flukeprints. And here at DV — “Gray Whales Are Dying: Starving to Death Because of Climate Change”
I’ve been working hard to put some roots down throughout life, and
while I am no longer living in El Paso, Spokane, Vietnam, Vancouver,
Portland, et al, the roots are connecting me more than many who have
stayed in their nook or neck of the woods. Get on the program, Americans
— wood wide web: The Atlantic!
Roots can also release carbon directly into the soil, which can then be absorbed by other roots. But if the spruces were doing that, then Klein should have found labelled carbon in every nearby plant—and he didn’t. There wasn’t any trace of the stuff in understory herbs like dog’s mercury and blackberries. It was, however, abundant in fungi, growing on the roots of the spruces and other trees.
These fungi—the mycorrhiza—are found on the roots of almost all land plants, and provide phosphorus and nitrogen in exchange for carbon-based sugars. They can also colonize several hosts at once, creating a large fungal internet that ferries nutrients and signaling chemicals between neighboring plants (much like the trees of Pandora in James Carmeron’s Avatar).
“There’s a below-ground community of mycorrhizal fungi invisibly interconnecting an above-ground plant community,” explains Christina Kaiser from the University of Vienna. “But it’s usually regarded as a network for supplying nutrients in exchange for carbon, not for delivering carbon from one plant to the other in such large amounts.”
She’s not kidding about the large amounts. Klein’s team estimated that in a patch of forest the size of a rugby field, the trees trade around 280 kilograms of carbon every year. That’s around 40 percent of the carbon in their fine roots, and about 4 percent of what they produce in total through photosynthesis.
My own web is a net out into the world, into the people’s lives
I interchange with. Their stories are my stories, and their lives
become part of mine. I have been a co-leader for a huge beach clean-up
here in the Newport area. I have written articles for the Newport News Timesabout
that clean-up, about the single-use plastic bag ban ordinance just
passed in Newport, about ocean acidification/hypoxia along the Central
Oregon Coast, and two centered on two restaurant owners who follow
sustainable business practices.
Thanks to the ACS and the month-long naturalist class, I’ve come to
appreciate not only the wild ecosystems around here, but the world of
the Central Coast hominids who I have met and learned from.
In the end, that intersectionality of
ecology-education-equity-economy we preach in sustainability circles
fits well with the people I have met who have an undying appreciation
and love for whales and other marine animals.
It’s good to put some roots down here on the Pacific. Ironically, I
have traveled the world as a writer and diver. But my birth was on the
Pacific– San Pedro, California — and here I have now returned to that
mighty Pacific which covers 28 percent of the earth (60,060,700 square
miles).
Newport, Depoe Bay, Yachats, Lincoln City, Waldport and other towns
are my stomping grounds now. My roots are far and wide, part of the wood
wide web, or my own sort, wide wonderful walkabout!
There is no longer anything sentimental about trying to save a tree or protect an old swimming hole. — Tom McCall, Earth Day, 1970
It always looks like skin cancer, that 10,000-foot view looking down on Earth. Looking down at Phoenix, or Cairo, or LA, the cancer grows and spreads. This unique perspective shows us how mother earth is not just torn up and concreted-in, but the clear cuts and slash and burns show the power of a stupid species, us, as well as the huge plumes of death silts spreading like tuberculosis clouds and chemical rivers decaying watersheds and pushing slicks of death out into the sea.
This doesn’t mean those invisible-to-the-human-eye killers aren’t just as bad, or worse, to nature and human health, but it’s the dramatic carcinomas of mining and mountaintop removal and clear-cutting that strike something deep in many of us.
When one sees the dramatic contrasts of shifting baselines – like the director and photographer did in the documentary, Chasing Ice, cataloging the shrinking of glaciers over time, or like this info-graphic video on the proliferation of Walmarts, the real power of economies of scale and the scale of destruction comes through. This stops at 2010 – now it’s 4,769 Walmarts in the USA, 6,360 Walmarts in international markets, and Sam’s Clubs is at 599 worldwide.
If you had an abscess in your tooth, would you keep going to dentist after dentist until you found a dentist who said, “Ah, don’t worry about it. Leave that rotten tooth in”? Or would you pull it out because more of the other dentists told you you had a problem? That’s sort of what we’re doing with climate change.
— James Balog, photographer, Chasing Ice
We know the high price of low cost, so to speak, and if you look at all those communities on the maps that are where the Walmarts have landed like viruses, the spiritual, economic, wages, labor, apartment and housing markets, mom and pop store clear-cutting that economic model holds. Just continue to think about every McDonald’s on every corner killing mom and pop stores. Every Starbucks. Every Amazon.dot.death/com delivery. Multiple that by factors of tens of thousands for all the other chains that are eating away at the very fabric of the nation and other nations.
Those engines that destroy — chain stores and restaurants — and transnational companies also eat up vast stacks to the moon our natural resources. Looking at the clear cutting just in the small area I now call home – the Central Coast of Oregon – I can extrapolate and then overlay just how cancerous Capitalism is, and that corporate capitalism – not the penny and region capitalism of past – is like skin cancer gone wild.
While Oregon is the 27th largest state by population, we’re No. 1 in corporate giving per capita. Oregon legislators ranked first in the nation by average amount received from the timber industry, third for contributions by drug companies and fourth for tobacco money.
The reality is – and I had this conversation with a young fellow living out of his car, a 30-year-old intelligent man – capitalism eats not only the land, air, water and natural resources, but it eats its own. When you look at Amazon or Walmart or Goldman Sachs or Wells Fargo – just name the company – the standard operating procedure is wealth at any means possible. That is the Soylent Green factor, and while having indentured servants and mass incarcerated consumers is profitable, the decay of society is also profitable. Treating the symptom but not the disease, and looking at the broken part but not the absurdly incapacitated whole is what capitalism counts on.
We don’t need Chris Hedges to herald in the End of the Empire or hawk his book, America, the Farewell Tour, to contextualize for us just what’s wrong with parasitic casino capitalism. In the Oregonian’s four-part series, we get the insider look at the corruption of our small state’s politicians not only from within the powerful lobbies of the state, but especially from the lobbies outside the state, and some outside the USA.
Every vote never did count when we as a citizenry are faced with gobs and gobs of money. The health of a single child or a thousand children is not contingent on the duty and sworn oaths of public servants to be the defenders, protectors, providers, and enhancers for the public interest, i.e. every citizen of the state.
Rep. Deborah Boone, (D-Cannon Beach) Boone said the companies that logged the watershed were constituents just as much as the townspeople who came to her for help.
“It’s a tough thing to have to decide between,” Boone said. “So I tried not to decide between.”
[…]
She double dipped, using campaign cash to pay bills that taxpayers also reimbursed. There was the $170 dinner during the legislative session, the multi-day $595 hotel stay in Salem, the gasoline and cell phone expenses after the session ended. Charging her campaign let her pocket some of the $10,000 in expense allowances the Legislature provided during her last year in office.
“You know, it’s legal, it’s perfectly legal to do,” Boone told The Oregonian/OregonLive. “I’m not saying I should’ve done it or whatever.”
The failure to limit campaign donations has turned Oregon into one of the biggest money states in American politics, an investigation by The Oregonian/OregonLive found. Corporate interests donate more money per resident in Oregon than in any other state. All that giving worked. Oregon now trails its West Coast neighbors on a long list of environmental protections.
As I have continued to harp, what happens in small-town America is what is demonstrably happening to America at large . . . and that community that now has mostly clear-cuts on its east slope with the vast Pacific Ocean on its west, has to deal with the wanton destruction of not only the beauty and the bounty of the forest that was once there, but also the diseased waters, air and fabric of life that clear-cuts produce.
One man with a chainsaw can do immense damage to a forested park. Legions of robotized giant timber-cutting, limb-jacking, log-dragging and stack-hauling equipment can turn vast hundreds of thousands of acres into war zones.
The meeting I went to in Depoe Bay Monday May 13 was attended by the speaker, Jason Gonzales, and a citizen who had worked on the aerial spraying ban for Lincoln County, and another citizen, and then me, citizen-journalist, I suppose. One speaker and three in the audience. That in itself is daunting, really, but the state of participation in America has never been great, and that small number has been dwindling over time because of distracted parents and even more distracted youth and retirees; it becomes more than an embarrassment. It is the hollowing out of our critical thinking skills. Add to that no real journalism exists in small-small communities, and the recipe is the current epoch of Sacrifice Zones.
Especially when it comes to what will render these beach and mountain communities useless when the number of clear cuts ensue and then add up to a tipping point that is a land of no return, as well as a people of no return, with all those tons of Agent Orange knock-offs sprayed.
Known DNA-mutating chemicals, chemicals known for creating Parkinsonian-like diseases, known for deficit-creation in newborns – from nerves, to brain synapses, to hormone disequilibrium, to diabetes, to motor-skills dysfunctions. And known cancers and unknown synergistic ailments rendering in adults – all sprayed on noxious weeds that are the by-product of cutting down dynamic forests and exposing rich soils to wind and sun, ice and cold, weed seeds and entangling vines.
The process of replanting trees is what the Weyerhaeusers of the world do, and for someone like Jason Gonzales, with Oregon Wild, that replanting of monocrops – single species trees that are genetically engineered – is akin to deforestation. Imagine, all those dynamic biological wonders in the soils, the fungi, the under story plants, the multiple species of trees, all home to incredible mammals and reptiles (and amphibians) and a hundred bird species. That dark, shadowy forest covering streamlets and creeks, keeping them filtered and cool, turning them into harbingers of trout and salmon, and the head sources of water that becomes part of larger watersheds that not only feed incredible wetlands and estuaries, but provide human communities with clean drinking water.
Imagine that calculus played out daily in the boardrooms and on the stock exchange floor, negotiating which community will become the next sacrifice zone, which region will be thrown into environmental and economic upheaval for the profit pimps to make their next cool million, cool billion.
Little state politics, little district politics, well, it’s the microcosm of what is happening in DC, in the Quebec, in all those capital cities in Europe.
Human and animal sacrifices. Until we have logging companies owning vast tracks of land, and locking up their roads. Private lands that are locked up for more raping and razing. Private industrial ownership of Oregon’s forests has amped up big time the past decade, overtaking the small family forests that once dominated the landscape of the Oregon Coast Range.
We have a tsunami risk here, big time, and, the high land is only reachable by those dirt roads, and now the timber industry has them all locked up. The amount of insanity in our capitalism is out the roof.
For Oregon Wild and others, the biggest concerns are big ones for sure – siltation of clear streams and rivers; chemicals entering the food web and bio-accumulating; lack of diversity at every level of the biological web of a forest.
The culprit is timber companies, whose warped idea of a forest is replanting clear cuts with one species, spread out evenly; and those tree farms suck up huge amounts of water between the 10th and 50th year of growth. Streams get smaller or disappear. Small unnamed creeks fouled with both silt and desiccating wind and sun exposure.
As more stream flows are restricted in the summer, more salmon failure occurs.
The mentality of the capitalists is “we need more logging and thinning” to prevent forest fires. How’d that work out for Paradise, California? The biggest actors in forests burning are wind, humidity and moisture. Big trees in dynamic forests do incredible things to wind and fire suppression: they protect the forest from devastating fires.
These tree farms are a blasphemy because the helicopters come in with 2-d-4 and atrazine and ghysophate and end up Agent Orange-ing the animals and the hominids. The triple whammy is carbon credits are thrown at timber companies, as they get carbon money for planting trees, and so they cut trees at a younger age to plant more trees. It’s madness.
“It’s no different than those Malaysian palm oil plantations. Converting diverse rain forests into a one-tree farm is desertification. The same thing applies to our Pacific Northwest forests – converting diverse forests into a one-tree farm. We’ve lost so much forestland. Tree farms are deserts.”
So, Round-up is being used on hundreds of thousands of clear-cuts as well as along roadsides, to take out invasive plants, one common invasive being Scotch Broom. It’s the roads – logging roads – where the chemicals get into our streams, Jason noted.
Some of these companies deploy helicopters and this toxic mix of herbicides, with added ingredients, including an indicator additive that will help timber companies cover their tail by seeing where the chemicals drift during application.
A typical clear-cut maxes out at 120 acres as one unit, but there are many exceptions to that proviso Oregon State allows, so there are typically 240-acre stump graveyards, but from 10,000 feet, those clear-cut parcels are almost contiguous, so the patchwork is like some crazed LSD user’s quilt work. Except we are talking millions of acres affected by the chemicals, by the roads, by the species lost, by the micro climate disruptions, by the siltation of rivers, by the new raging fire landscape.
When we are talking about logging communities, those people see trees as dollars, and have no concept of seven generations out, or much longer for maintaining resiliency. Or what about all those people that think uncontrolled growth, uncontrolled fossil fuel burning, and uncontrolled culling of the diversity of species can go on indefinitely, no harm done? These people have no capacity to study micro fungi worlds. Or to understand how important that world is to the forest.
Most people can’t conceive of their own guts and physiology consisting of a finely-tuned orchestration of hormones, biochemicals, brain signals all tied to their guts. Most people have no concept of what an atmosphere is, and what water molecules and CO2 and methane do to the greenhouse effect.
As many intellectuals know, maybe 40 percent of North Americans – that’s 150 million – believe in the second coming of Jesus Christ in their lifetimes, and that group has pretty much sold the ranch down the shit creek. How many Evangelicals really think despoiling the land, despoiling rivers, despoiling air and oceans is a crime against their godhead?
Many in the Reagan through to Trump administrations believe another Faustian Bargain – they are the elite, the top notch, top of the manure heap, and therefore, there is some magical reason for their bank accounts bulging and their companies’ resource plundering and their country overthrowing other countries.
And this leaves me with scratching my head, wondering why the local newspaper in Newport — twice a week hard copy and the same online presence — would fail to want to cover the stories I have been writing about. I was told that I need to write more “dispassionately,” by one of the editors, who has never met me but has published a handful of my pieces. I am sure the powers that be have already scolded him for having a different style of writer (me) covering those “enviro” topics.
That is the tragedy, yet another one, for a fellow like me with so many years of journalism and writing experience that just listening to most of the J-school people or small-town editors and even the “professors” of the craft, the madness I have to hold back as deja vu, and quell “the trauma” of first running into retrograde and conservative thinkers when I was 18 just starting out as a reporter, is also daunting to me.
Here’s what probably won’t get published in the small Oregon town newspaper.
To Spray or Not to Spray – One of Many Questions Cited by Oregon Wild
An on-line monitoring system gives residents a heads up on herbicide spraying.
Jason Gonzales lives in the woods located in the Oregon Coast Range, is friends with loggers and lumber mill owners, and wants to know when chemicals are being sprayed near his family or on forests where they camp and recreate.
“People who have lived in areas where aerial spraying occurred never knew it was happening,” Gonzales of Oregon Wild told a small group Monday at the Depoe Bay Community Center. “The monitoring system, FERNS, allows neighbors to see the impact aerial spraying has on watersheds. As soon as people start seeing the areas where timber companies were spraying, they get concerned.”
The tool at hand – in place since 2015 through the Oregon Department of Forestry – is called the Forest Activity Electronic Reporting and Notification System. The on-line notification system allows citizens to create an area of interest map of up to 23,000 acres to assess forest activity in it. Gonzalez has been showing various communities along the coast how to use the system, which is a notification product that gives landowners email notifications when a timber company is applying for road, timber harvest and herbicide spraying permits.
The notifications for active operations/application for permit (NOAP) has to be filed at least 15 days before an operation can proceed.
Lincoln County voted on banning aerial spraying May 2017; the citizens fought hard to get the measure on the ballot and fought harder on dispelling the anti-ban rhetoric coming from the some of the largest pesticide companies in the USA – through the trade association, CropLife America, an industry group representing major pesticide manufacturers, including Monsanto, Syngenta, Dow AgroSciences LLC, and DuPont Crop Protection.
One of those citizens, who now lives in Waldport, is Debra Fant, a retired nurse who was also at the FERNS training/presentation.
She stated strongly her position: “How short sighted is it to value money and power without concern or understanding the inherent value of health, nourishing food, clean water and air, and fertility of soil from diversity of organisms that balances the natural systems?”
Taking on the likes of Monsanto is daunting, Gonzales and Fant conceded, but the fact is less than 14,000 Lincoln County voters supported the aerial spraying ban despite the reported $34 per voter spent by CropLife to halt it.
Fant was clear to point out that the chemical stew used to kill so-called noxious weeds includes hormone disrupters. While the goal for a retired nurse like Fant, who has been in Lincoln County 40 years, is to have no chemicals sprayed either by helicopter or by hand, the FERNS notification system gives people the opportunity to reduce exposure to the chemicals and gives them more breathing room to make adjustments when spraying will affect them directly and through watershed contamination.
“Having activists in the area where the clear-cutting occurs and the aerial spraying is proposed can both delay and change the nature of the spraying,” Gonzales stated, as he lives on 160 acres of forest land with neighbors who are highly engaged when an application for clear cutting and spraying occurs.
“Timber companies don’t want the aerial spraying filmed.” In his area, proposed aerial spraying was changed to backpack spraying, which involves not only more direct pin-pointed application, but fewer chemicals.
Gonzales mentioned that March 28 this year, more than 25 people showed up at the Veronia Grange to hear the same talk he gave in Depoe Bay, which is the same presentation he’s given in Florence, Rockaway Beach and other coastal towns.
“My Power Point which usually takes less than 45 minutes was extended an hour,” he stated. “There were six paid timber industry people there challenging almost everything I showed and said.” The Q & A period, the Oregon Wild activist stated, went on for two hours.
Most dramatic in the talk at Depoe are the Google Earth images of the Central Coast, showing over real time the amount of clear cutting that is taking place. “With that sort of photographic evidence, even many loggers at my talks shake their heads and state that, Yeah, that is a lot of clear-cutting I didn’t know about.’ They can’t debate the visual evidence.”
His talk at Depoe Bay questioned the Oregon’s Forest Practices Act, which he states “has the weakest state level logging rules in the region.” In addition, he and his group are looking to make forest laws stronger for “the good of communities, drinking water, and carbon sequestration.”
Debra, who is with Lincoln County Community Rights, mentioned the extensive coverage of the Lincoln County aerial spray ban in September 2018 by Sharon Lerner of the Intercept: “How a Ragtag Group of Oregon Locals Took on the Biggest Chemical Companies in the World – And Won.”
Gonzales ramified media coverage of our forests by highlighting the recent Oregonian’s four-part series, “Polluted by Money: How corporate cash corrupted one of the greenest states in America,” and the March 15, 2019 final story, “Perfectly Legal: The clear-cut rewards of campaign cash.”
“Look, I am the only full-time paid person working on conservation forest issues in the state of Oregon, the only one paid to look at logging laws,” Jason said, emphasizing there are plenty of volunteers and citizen groups throwing in on local issues. He mentioned how Rockaway Beach highlighted in the Oregonian series demonstrates the “complete ineffectiveness of our forestry practices in the state and the dirty money influencing both Democrats and Republicans.”
That watershed provides drinking water to Rockaway Beach and has been logged so extensively in the past 15 years almost all 1,300 acres are clear-cuts. Gonzales works with residents who complain of sicknesses, chemical odors and silting of the rivers and creeks. These are the same people cited by the Oregonian who say they “struggled to be heard by a local lawmaker [ Rep. Deborah Boone ] who took thousands from timber companies.”
When asked about the current legislative session, Gonzales was adamant: “The Legislature passed up all opportunities to modernize the state’s logging laws. The swing vote, Senator Arnie Roblan (D- Coos Bay) voted against everything that would have regulated the timber and chemical industries.”
To highlight the issue, Carl Whiting of Rockaway Beach Citizens for Watershed protection, recently stated:
The clear-cuts are ugly, but at least they are visible. The layers of chemicals aerially sprayed onto the newly cleared hills and valleys are not. The vast majority of our communities border private forest lands whose bald, brown slopes make up the bulk of our watersheds. Glyphosate and 2-4-D drift downwind to mingle with the Indaziflam and Clopyralid flowing downstream. These chemicals are used to poison every fern, flower and berry bush until only a silent, ecological desert of farmed fir trees remains.
waves move mountains
water so “soft” yet over
eons like titanium drill
as continents fall tides
mean more than a romance
with Pacific or Caribbean
motherhood, trapped sea
child swimming inside reef
of progenitor, she lifts two
gravities, holds two
emotional lines
tethering child to
her cave, body solid
twin lives soon
separated, cleaved from
matriarchal beachhead
you leave shared orbits
this infant moves slowly
no wildebeest she
holds child as baby
chips away into her
own series of statues
against all odds
mother is at heart
of child even in her rebellion
like waves pounding
clay silt flowering
into crumbling islands
the sea holds you
the sound of the birth
like outgoing tide
air currents
pushing albatross
mothers too
there is a spring inside
mother’s body
after gestation eclipsing
placental expurgation
body and soul connected
by air, currents upwellings
fused with sea ions
mother, daughter, lost
conversations
the day is flowery
set as a moment frozen
family sets a new table
leaves acrimony behind
yet women are burdening
themselves with lifting
children into sentient
people adults dancing
to new songs
the hum
humming of mother
child inside mother’s
reef, that daughter
is called to eclipsing
humanity, child to adult
mother never waiting
pulling child to her
years separated
the draw to that
cut umbilical
songs wrinkled time mother grabbing child to push her away so daughter one day will return, maybe listening now to the tide inside herself the new life floating in the daughter’s ocean together we are one sea, tides in and out we are the mother sea waiting for her to pull us back away from our own destruction
Over at Dissident Voice, Mother’s day, 2019 — Poem here, Poetry on Sunday.
while people argue about which terms to use — ‘climate change’ or ‘climate chaos’ or ‘climate unpredictability’ (it’s global warming, man) — communities have no way to tackle all that broken infrastructure
No Water. No Life. No Blue. No Green. – Sylvia Earle
In the tradition of many of my posts, I end up looking at the local through a sometimes fine and other times coarse lens to extrapolate what this country, and most First World We Are the Only Ones Who Matter countries, is facing way beyond a world without polar and glacial ice.
The formula is simple — and you can replace “there” or “here” with whichever community or city or county or state or region you care to discuss. This is an earth where almost everywhere on the planet is supercharged on noxious capitalism and addictive consumerism; where the 99 Percent of the People Are Up a Shit Creek without a Paddle: the roads here, or the bridges there, or the emergency response here, or the water system there, or the schools here, or the housing there, or the chronically ill, under-employed, unemployed here, or the disenfranchised there, or the poor here, or the health care system there, or the ecosystems here or the state of the economy there.
Look, the conversations in a town like Newport don’t involve some of the important issues that say a Dahr Jamail might write about. Newport, which numbers 10,000 as regular citizens/residents but balloons on some days — when the sun is out and the temperatures in Portland and all over the state of Oregon and Washington, and parts of Idaho, and California hit above 90 degrees F — to 50,000 people is small town, small minded, simple yet has to deal with modern and global warming issues no matter how distracted we get on the pot holes issues.
Up and down this coast and California’s and Washngton’s, many communities can only survive (regressive real estate taxes and sin taxes/hotel taxes/gas taxes) with that huge influx of tourists pushing their big butts into these respective communities with internal combustion machines with other internal combustion machines (boats, jet skis) in tow. We survive on trinkets, fish and chips sold, time shares, Air B & Bs, booze, food and drugs (and pot, now that cannabis is legal in OR).
One big Black Friday retail and service economy chunk of the year that feeds the residents in a boom or bust cycle that has made it almost impossible for parents to raise children because parents have to have two or five jobs between the two of them. The schools are busting at the seams and burn-out is high in public service jobs.
And, many tourists come out here, think: “This is it for my last hurrah . . . I’m moving here”; or they imagine it’s the ideal place from which to land after leaving the madness of big city life and/or to raise a family and send them to school while enjoying the beach town life.
Oh, I understand the draw, but the reality is leaving one city because of its wild fires or increasing vehicular traffic or rising crime rates or lowering air/water quality levels or degrading environmental situations or discordant populations or weakening school systems or flagging labor opportunities or lowering standards of living actually just brings all of that and more to communities like Lincoln City, Depoe Bay, Newport, Waldport, Reedsport, Coos Bay etc.
The world of Corrupt, Dog-eat-Dog, Disconnected, Non-Systems Thinking Capitalism follows American wherever they go. Nothing about regional planning for resiliency, for sharing of assets and that includes water, air, industries taught in schools, taught at work, or taught within families or generations. Instead, Americans are acculturated to boom or bust; and I notice more and more Americans laugh at the places and people they left behind. They blame the people in LA for sticking it out, even blame them for being 4th, 6th or 10th generation Californians. Americans like to piss on everyone else’s parade, not just internationally, but domestically as well. This is the schizoid blue state/red state/purple state infantilism and corruption.
People here laugh or scream at Salem, Portland, Bend, what have you. You know, so much for rah-rah “we are one state and should act accordingly as one state for all.”
Here’s how one scenario, locally, plays out nationally — again, replace pink shrimp fishermen/women with Volkswagen workers or Amazon workers or hospital workers or, well, you get it: pit worker against worker.
NEWPORT — It’s been weeks of blue tarps and yawns on the Newport shrimp boats. But now, frustration is on deck too.
The Pacific pink shrimp season has been open for a month, but processors and fishermen are still far apart on price. The captains and crews of some 115 boats along the coast are holding out while a deal is cut. Their patience is being tried as a fleet of some 20 boats from Washington and Columbia River ports make hay in the traditional fishing grounds of the Newport fleet.
“I don’t know what these guys would do if that was happening out front down here,” said Coos Bay shrimp boat owner Nick Edwards.
Some 500,000 pounds of shrimp landed so far by boats breaking the strike indicates there’s good product volume to be had.
But, Edwards said, shrimpers are looking at offers of 30, 60, 80 and 90 cents per pound for the different grades of shrimp, down from 45, 72, 90 cents and $1.20 last year, when fishermen struck for 44 days to get that price schedule.
Edwards blamed the slow and steady consolidation of processing facilities under just a few corporate names for a lack of competition and less chance for a deal fishermen can accept.
Newport fisherman Gary Ripka said that north coast boats breaking the strike have traditionally observed an unspoken agreement to stay well north of Newport.
“They’re rubbing it in our faces,” he said. “They’re fishing right in front of town. Good trips. I’s become a real boiling point.”
Oh my oh my. So much for red-blooded All-American solidarity. This is capitalism run amok a million times over. Pitting worker against families, men against women, youth against old. Breaking solidarity strikes. Market monopolization the curse here, and everywhere. Hell, the reputation of Pacific Seafood Group in Newport gouging independent fishers and controlling all aspects of the market, including the only ice making facility in the area to pack on board the catch of the day, speaks of the crude, mean, boom and bust, I got mine, you ain’t getting yours mentality of a country that was based on murdering millions of First Nation inhabitants and using stolen peoples to toil the land. A nation of Irish and German white slaves, and Chinese slaves.
Don’t cry for me, Argentina. Ha. Replace Argentina with Flint, Detroit, Baltimore, and hundreds of cities in the USA. How’s that Flint Lead Enhanced Water working out?
We shit on our own water supply, spray carcinogens on our own human offspring, and we cook the goose that lays the golden egg.
Much of the allure here is the wide open beaches, cold Pacific tides, sometime incredible sunny summer days in the 70s, and, well, fish and crustaceans on the menu. Whale watching. Sea lion and seal entertainment.
But we have gray whales washing on shore emaciated, sick, big carcasses rotting on shore. More and more of them. Seals and sea lions, sickened, too. Rivers clogged or polluted. Yet, the tourist brochures show whales in pristine condition, seals and birds in a natural wonderland, dolphins breaching the waters and elk crossing the Highway 101.
Like all communities who do not know the value of all those ecosystems and nature services, and like all communities that have a few rich and the rest struggling hard, and like all communities with a rural character that have high youth poverty, high drug use, high homelessness, Newport and Lincoln City are in the midst of more struggle than just shrimpers duking it out for higher rates per pound.
We are vulnerable to droughts, vulnerable to huge rain events, vulnerable to an earthquake. Vulnerable to education cuts. Vulnerable to population influxes and depopulation. I wrote about that, here:
Below is another article about another transplant — the water planner is from Seattle area. He is here, in quietude, and my guess Mike below is in the high echelon income bracket. He has a nice house, I am sure, and he has the time to redesign it to be more “green” and water “efficient.”
He showed a group of us some really cool rainwater collection and gray water collection systems, even gray water filtering systems to deliver potable water. You know, the designs Mike has facilitated mostly go to the very rich, or rich communities. But, in the end, water is more precious than gold, and cities across the country are using valuable H2o to water grass and trees. We have toilets that leak, toilets that flush five gallons a use. We have people who have no idea how the water that gets to their taps in Lincoln City got there.
The amount of electricity to move water from source to plant, from purification, to pumping station, to tanks and then from tanks to homes, well, it’s huge.
Electricity in the water Much of the electricity used to supply water is consumed in pumping. To collect water, it is pumped from below ground or from surface water such as lakes and rivers. It then needs to be pushed through pipes to the water treatment plant, pushed through treatment systems (such as filters) and pushed through more pipes up to a water tower (typically). From there, gravity does the work to push the water to your home. This pumping consumption, along with some miscellaneous treatment plant consumption, on average adds up to about 1.5 kilowatt-hour of electricity consumed per thousand gallons [kWh/kgal] of water. This does not include energy that may be applied to the water in your home, such as heat for hot water.
When the water goes down the drain, it requires more electricity. The wastewater is collected, pumped, treated and discharged. An additional 1.7 kWh/kgal of electricity is expended on wastewater pumping and treatment.
So, in total, and the amount varies depending on where you live, about 3.2kWh of electricity is consumed for each thousand gallons of water delivered to your home. For a kitchen faucet delivering five gallons per minute of water, the water-embodied electricity is pouring out at about 1,000 watts. That’s like running a virtual hairdryer every time you turn on the faucet.
So, while we sit on our thumbs and allow the billionaires and millionaires and the military industrial octopus complex determine our destinies while destroying other countries’ destinies; while we listen to and view on dumb phone every conceivable perverted story akin to a Trump-Kushner Family Outing; while we stiff arm salute corporations, the boss, the job, the junk we have and the more junk we want, a gigantic swatch of the country, maybe 80 percent, will not be prepared for earthquake, flood, heat wave, fires, droughts, crop failures, disease outbreaks, food shortages, money woes.
So you betcha we are all Flint or Houston or Detroit or Paradise or Des Moines or Puerto Rica . . . . One hell of a lot more has to be done daily to fight, with weapons and tools. Yet, I am finding (see future postings, a future book of mine) more and more people who hate to know their history and who think life, including 12 years of school (or more if they are college-bound) is about “the job.” What we can’t use on the job, or to get a job, then it’s superfluous. More and more Americans across all sectors are desirous of only ways to perform on the job, how to land a job and what to do in that job.
Here is the story on Stormwater management. I hope it makes it in the local newspaper, though I think the editor is getting Paul Haeder Fatigue Syndrome because I go to these events, report on them and then write about them. I’ve already beaten a dead journalism horse to death many a time. But to repeat — we have gutted journalism at the local level so-so much that there is nothing in most towns, and those that have a day or two a week newsprint paper, well, threadbare seems to robust a word for today’s small-town and community new!
**–** **–**
Local Sustainable Water Management Expert Encourages More Green Design
Water is a human right, according to many around the world. For Lincoln County, Oregon, residents, the fact that we have water delivered to us from one source – a plant on Big Creek River – belies the fragility of this source of sustenance.
For one local resident who is an integrated stormwater management expert, water planning is big: we may see up to 80 inches of rain a year hitting our county, but we need to make sure that rainfall gets back into the groundwater and replenishes the water cycle.
Michael Broili, principal of Living Systems Design, is passionate about sustainable development. He spoke to the Mid-Coast Watersheds Council monthly group in Newport about what designs could be beneficial for Lincoln County residents.
“Water’s been so much of my life,” Broili said, emphasizing he now resides at South Beach, after spending a quarter of a century in the Puget Sound area. “I was in the Navy and then was a commercial fisherman, and then water management design for twenty-five years, so I know the value of water.”
He talked a lot about water management as a holistic approach for getting cities, schools, businesses and home owners to look at ways to develop gray water collection systems to help offset the need to use pure water from the Water Plant to irrigate landscapes and flush toilets.
A typical short term rain event creates tons of water just coming off a small roof, let along all the impervious surfaces like parking lots, warehouses, and compacted roads and streets.
“One inch of rain coming off a thousand square foot roof produces 623 gallons of runoff,” he stated. That’s almost 2.5 tons of water.
Reducing this water sluicing from hard surfaces back into stormwater catchments and diversions prevents so many of issues tied to the health of rivers and other watersheds, as well as stopping erosion.
The 20 people at the Visual Arts Center got to see some designs Mike helped create and implement in cities like Seattle, Shoreline, Edmunds that help rivers stay healthy through less disturbance (scrubbing) from surges during rain events.
Rain gardens and bio swales are two ways to get water from a parking lot to filter through biological means (grass, soil, gravel, plant roots) so the runoff ends up cleaner as it heads back into the stormwater systems.
Mortality of salmon species has been cut through mitigating the hydrocarbons that might have ended up directly into streams but were instead held and retained through several biofiltration landscape designs.
On a more holistic level, practitioners like Roili call it Hydrologic Restoration, and while we are in a rural area, unlike Portland or Seattle, all the designs for new construction Lincoln City or Newport could help utilizing graywater capture systems for landscape purposes, as well as creating innovative and healing rain gardens with some dynamic zones and robust planting. Existing structures could be retrofitted to these designs.
His mantra is simple when it comes to construction sites – “Find ways to reduce site disturbance and restore soil function.”
Some of the members of the MCWC wanted to know about permeable road and parking surfaces as well as green roofs. “The goal is to disconnect hard surfaces and bring back the water cycle to a near forested situation where no runoff occurs because of the natural features of complex soil layers, leaf litter (duff) and transpiration from trees.”
The MCWC’s mission is aligned with many of Broili’s hydrologic planning goals – “MCWC is dedicated to improving the health of streams and watersheds of Oregon’s Central Coast so they produce clean water, rebuilding healthy salmon populations and support a healthy ecosystem and economy.”
Part of May 2’s presentation was anchored by a famous Benjamin Franklin saying, “When the well is dry, we know the worth of water.”
We discussed the City of Newport’s Ocean Friendly Garden that was spearheaded several years ago by Surfrider at City Hall. Surfrider also looked at pollution going into Nye Creek, finding several homes’ sewer discharge was directly entering the stormwater system.
The City’s sewer and stormwater infrastructure has been mapped and various groups including Surfrider helped advocate for revisions to the municipal code to mandate best management practices for sewer, stormwater and other non-point source pollution controls.
Six years ago, the City of Newport created a new stormwater utility and an opt-out incentive program for residents and businesses who want to disconnect from the system in order to install the green infrastructure Broili discussed to prevent rainwater from leaving their property.
“This may seem like big city stuff,” Broili told the crowd. “But rural communities and a city like Newport can benefit from integrated water management.”
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Again, I could go on and analyze what I wrote and what bigger issues parlay from this small talk on a small part of sustainability, yet it is not so small, is it, given the precious nature of water, how we get it, how it is taken from the water cycle, and what happens to the ecosystems, to boot?
I’ve also reported on James Anderson’s research tied to water vapors and increased storm activity.
The ocean was running almost 10ºC warmer all the way to the bottom than it is today and the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere would have meant that storm systems would be violent in the extreme, because water vapor, which is an exponential function of water temperature, is the gasoline that fuels the frequency and intensity of storm systems.
The chance that there will be any permanent ice left in the Arctic after 2022 is essentially zero. When you look at the irreversibility and you study the numbers, this along with the moral issue is what keeps you up at night.
Harvard scientist who worked on the ozone hole decades ago — remember, chlorofluorocarbons?
I know everyday I wake up I am about to teach people things — PK12 or daily in my interactions with people, or what I can teach myself. I understand that capitalism and the way industry has been set up have to disappear. It is not an easy task when the controllers and the purse strings and one’s survivability is set by a small elite with their roving marauders of money launderers, banks, cops, collectors, usury thugs.
I’ll let Dahr Jamail have the last word, over at Truthout:
Each day I wake and begin to process the daily news of the climate catastrophe and the global political tilt into overt fascism. The associated trauma, grief, rage and despair that come from all of this draws me back to the work of Stan Rushworth, Cherokee elder, activist and scholar, who has guided much of my own thinking about how to move forward. Rushworth has reminded me that while Western colonialist culture believes in “rights,” many Indigenous cultures teach of “obligations” that we are born into: obligations to those who came before, to those who will come after, and to the Earth itself.
Hence, when the grief and rage threaten to consume me, I now orient myself around the question, “What are my obligations?” In other words, “From this moment on, knowing what is happening to the planet, to what do I devote my life?“
Each of us must ask ourselves this question every day, as we face down catastrophe.
words fail even upon
the death of Arthur Condie, RIP 2019
missing life over a scotch kilts and bagpipes just part of a show, he danced for eight decades-plus, lad who swam Odysseus’ sea, headwinds of Highland dew with mates on the peloton, rubbed hard living young the life of Scottish men dreaming of Route 66
*-*
slipstream of life brings gravity to my own lift that man was like clan brother, there in Arizona family visits, always the character, song and dance a joke for every occasion
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taught me life is hope full viewed with a big lens parlaying hope, pleasure he was a friend, two worlds apart, he and I yet weight of laughter holds me still
*-*
he is sound recalled
Tartan vest sometimes
always dapper Arthur
life cradled in stories
misadventures turned into refined
reminiscences, boyhood rites
Edinburgh, passage
over the pond into Canada
the world his oyster then
setting adventure in Detroit
Page, Arizona, his abalone
diving off California
*-*
stories are veins connective tissue to go forth muscle and mind memory worlds apart, his known with troubadour’s gusto ‘Art tells tall tale again’ pleasure for companies audiences, my own dispossession pressed into service precipice, near edge of his life
*-*
he’ll never know me the fast and furious departures from living depression, hard scrabble the flow of poetry, politics fits of criminality, beauty giver clan, brooding forceful, passionate
*-*
life can be humbling or an exit plan for pain or celebratory egos seem to pick like crabs, yet his came from the song the edge of Bobby Burns the antiquated, patina locked in magical time, he traveled with wife they seemed stitched together, long hauls several life makeovers his ending her breath seized her forever
*-*
he’s more than distant memory more than sum total of last years, oh the hard years before, when a child’s nothing more than foreshadowing death, life, processing who a man is outside the shell of civility, outside the pomp Art displayed, the truth of it he seemed alive and unreal at times, yet his survival holds like flashes of scenes inside this poet graying movie reels light shadow action
*-*
I never know which particle of life stays hardened like calcium how the brain is magical dark into light harsh into buoyancy or a relationship, man to boy then man to man old man to man here I sit, old man some say, six decades only, the light of recall is as bright as that teen or boy, Art juggling humor style, grace, aplomb insanity in a comic way
*-*
lessons can be retraced death like a huge wind whipping up sands waves crashing until a fog sets in one with oneself heavy air bringing forth almost hologram vision of the man alive he’s always young again penetrating my own aging his vitality, young with new stories the boy, me, learning tricks of memory
*-*
Scotland the Brave, maybe
this Arthur, though, deeply
felt even as vitality
scabs over into the last
breath of sagging man
he is what I hope all good
can be – a breath held
silent memory
opened palms
a jig or two
over brown ale
his reminiscing
defining me more
than a man I called
brother, uncle, friend
what a ‘character’ indeed.
Paul Haeder, Author 