Author: Slingshot Collective

This spring and summer should (or could) bring a rising tide of protests against Obama’s escalation of the US war in Afghanistan. Sending more US troops won’t make anyone safer, won’t help the Afghan people, and will needlessly risk the lives of US troops and Afghan civilians. The handful of Al-Qaeda militants, who were the original justification for the war, haven’t been in Afghanistan for years. The escalation is a continued waste of money, just welfare for defense contractors and corrupt Afghan officials and gangsters. Bombing villages to prop up a corrupt US-supported regime (which rigged the last election) is just pouring gasoline on a fire — its fueling more fighting and a society-wide resort to violence. Looked at from an Afghan perspective, what would you do if a foreign power invaded your country, tried to impose a particular segment of local thugs on your village, and flew drones over your fields night and day? The Afghan war is the greatest recruiting tool for suicide bombers and religious fanatics who offer an alternative to US hegemony, no matter how repressive and terrifying it may be.

Why is Obama continuing, and now expanding, the failed Bush war policy? There are many reasons, but a key is that Obama’s US government serves the same basic interests as Bush’s — maintaining US dominance. His understanding of “terrorism” and use of this concept to centralize power are essentially the same as under Bush.

The US invaded Afghanistan — one of the poorest and most remote countries in the world — in 2001 after the September 11 attacks as part of Bush’s “war on terrorism”. The war on terrorism was a rhetorical and political trick. Terrorism is a tactic, not an ideology or cohesive movement, so the “war” was by definition endless and against anyone who might oppose US interests. Its real intent had more to do with justifying increases in US power at home and abroad than with “protecting” anyone.

Because the war on Afghanistan was a component of the war on terrorism power grab, the main point of the war had nothing much to do with Afghanistan, and very much to do with placing the US into a war mentality, and keeping it there. There was never much interest in how one might “win” the war. Certainly no serious person thought that Afghanistan would eventually become a modern liberal democracy with Starbucks and Wholefoods markets in stripmalls outside Kabul.

Given the US role in funding guerrilla war against the Soviets in the 1980s by arming Afghan insurgents (including Osama bin Laden back in the day) it was pretty predictable that an Afghan insurgency would develop to resist a US puppet state. Afghans fought three Anglo-Afghan wars against the British (1839-42, 1878-80, 1919) which demonstrated their hostility to outside rule.

There are a number of parallels between past Afghan insurgencies and the current resistance to the US attempt to impose

liberal reforms (that have some popularity in urban areas) on very conservative rural areas. One of the key policies of the Soviet-backed Afghan government in the 1970s and 80s was an attempt to improve conditions for women and secularize the country. Rural conservatives took up arms to defend their conservative religious beliefs and maintain traditional repressive gender relations.

So what is Obama’s plan? Despite his claim that he intends to start a troop pullback in 18 months after a “surge” stabilizes the situation, he didn’t commit to withdraw all US troops at any point in the future. There’s no reason to think US action can stabilize the situation, especially since the presence of foreign troops itself stirs up resistance. Fighting there has tribal roots as well as cultural ones. Without significant pressure from within the US to abandon the failed Afghan war, the US is likely to maintain troops there indefinitely.

Protesting the Afghan war goes hand-in-hand with exposing the war on terrorism. The media and mainstream society are obsessed with terrorism because it offends their sense of control and order. Look at the extreme panic in the wake of the underwear bomber. After the cold war ended, it appeared that the US global industrial order had achieved total political, military, economic and ideological hegemony. It wasn’t just that the US was the only military superpower left standing. US assumptions and values about what constitutes a good life were the sole controlling ideology. Under this ideology, the only human goal is earning money and buying consumer products — TVs, cars, high-speed internet service, etc.

While terrorist attacks shatter the mainstream ideas of stability and total control thereby giving the system a wonderful excuse to increase state power, it’s important to keep some perspective on the situation and realize that terrorist attacks are not the greatest threat to world safety.

Consider that the number of people actually killed by terrorists on September 11 and since then around the world — while tragic for the innocent people murdered — is actually quite tiny when you compare it to how many people have died just in the USA from non-political shootings or acts of violence. Or what about compared to the number of people killed in all the military actions supposedly designed to control the terrorist threat?

And what about the dangers to human health and happiness from the regular functioning of the industrial/economic system? No one is in a frenzy because of the tens of thousands of people killed annually by automobiles. Or the hundreds of thousands of people who die from smoking — does anyone fight a war on tobacco companies because their executives are terrorists? What about industrial pollution, which kills and sickens millions of people? No, the chemical industry isn’t “terrorist” because those deaths and injuries are just a necessary cost of doing business. The society lives in fear of terrorists getting access to chemical weapons, but wait a minute — big corporations have access to chemical weapons and they are actually using them and people are dying all the time!

The “regular” functions of the industrial machine are considered acceptable and reasonable costs of doing business even though they cause much greater harm than terrorism. These activities are controlled by those in power and trying to decrease these harms hurts their power and wealth. Terrorism, meanwhile, is not under their control, and it drives the people in power crazy, while giving them a huge and continuing excuse to have more police, bigger armies, better surveillance, and more checkpoints and searches.

The war on terror and the war in Afghanistan are not being fought for regular people either in the developed countries or in Afghanistan — they’re both being waged by elites and for elites to increase their power, but we’re the ones getting killed. Its time we cut through the hype about terrorism — the idea that peasants in rural Afghanistan are the biggest threat to someone in suburban Illinois — and take on our real enemies: the corporations, the military warlords and the media talking heads who fool us into mis-understanding what’s really going on. Let’s demand US troops out of Afghanistan and struggle for a world where people control our own destiny.

Slingshot published its first book in 2009 to celebrate the 40th anniversary of People’s Park in Berkeley. People’s Park Still Blooming is a 200-page, full color coffee table book edited by activist and park gardener Terri Compost. It was particularly appropriate for us to publish the book since Slingshot traces its roots to the struggles surrounding the Park — grassroots street level radicals vs. The Man.

The book uses hundreds of photographs as well as interviews, news clippings and book excerpts to tell the story of People’s Park past, present and future. Since a diverse coalition of activists seized a vacant lot to build the Park in 1969, the Park has been a model for do-it-yourself direct action. In the years since 1969, generations of activists have fought to permit the users of the Park to decide how it should be developed, operated and maintained — embodying the principal of user development — in the face of constant police repression. Amidst all the riots and protests, the park still blooms as a community garden and native plant repository in a dense urban area; as a liberated zone for concerts and political rallies; and as one of t

he few places open to all people — rich and poor, homeless and housed — in an increasingly consumer-dominated Berkeley. Daily free food provided by Food Not Bombs and others draws a constantly shifting band of punks, travelers, elders, artists and marginalized people to the Park.

The book is neither a dry historical text nor mere picture book — its conception and actualization are intimately tied to a living struggle with implications far wider than just Berkeley or just a park. The struggle for the Park is the same as the global struggle for freedom, cooperation and ecological balance over hierarchy, corporations and a throw-away world.

We still have copies of the book available and we’re looking for help getting it out to the world — particularly beyond Berkeley and California, where its mostly been passed around so far. It retails for $24.95 — a lot of money but it’s worth it. Please help us clear out all these boxes of books! Check our website for mailorder or bookstores that carry it. Let us know if:

• You know of a library or bookstore that might want a copy;

• You can publish a book review.

http://slingshot.tao.ca

While it’s easy to think of the recent earthquake in Haiti as just another natural disaster, it’s the poverty and injustice that have plagued Haiti for generations that have turned a natural earthquake into a human catastrophe. A 7.0 earthquake is a huge earthquake, but when one strikes a rich country like Japan, only a few people are killed because buildings are earthquake resistant and emergency infrastructure is in place to deal with emergencies. On the other hand, Haiti was already an economic disaster before the earthquake, with the worst poverty in the Western Hemisphere.

Haiti’s poverty is not an accident — it is the result of the global economic system which removes wealth and resources from the global south for the benefit of rich countries. This system is enforced with military power, which is why it is so ironic to see US troops helping earthquake victims portrayed as heroes. Sure it’s nice when US troops arrive to pass out water and pick up the wounded, but wouldn’t it be nice if the US military didn’t help destroy societies in the first place and leave them so vulnerable to natural disasters?

The US military has a long history in Haiti. In 1915, at the request of US banks which had taken over the Haitian banking system in 1910-11, US Marines invaded, beginning an occupation that would last until 1934. After dissolving the legislature, US officials wrote a new constitution, adopted in a flawed vote in 1919, which abolished a long-standing prohibition on foreign ownership of land. (Supposedly, future-president FDR personally wrote the constitution while acting as under-secretary of the Navy.)

US forces used an 1864 law that required peasants to perform free labor on roads in lieu of paying road tax to force thousands of people to build hundreds of miles of roads under the corvée system. The roads helped US troops move around and opened up the countryside to economic development. Haitian peasants saw the forced labor system as a return to slavery at the hands of white US solders.

When Haitians rebelled against US rule in 1919, US marines put down the uprising, killing up to 15,000 Haitians according to Haitian historians. (The US Navy admitted that 3,250 were killed.) Even after US Marines left in 1934, the US retained control over Haiti’s external finances until 1947.

Haitian society was in shambles before, during and after the US occupation, economically plundered by transnational corporations as well as local elites. Military coups were followed by military dictatorships, some supported by US authorities and others shunned, but the common thread has been a US focus on profits and control, while neglecting self-determination, justice and economic development for the common population.

Haiti is a victim of failed international development schemes that leave developing countries deep in debt to build mega-projects that don’t address basic human needs. In the 1930s, the World Bank financed the Peligre Dam, completed in 1956. It was built by Brown and Root of Texas, the now infamous defense contractors. The fertile agricultural Artibonite River valley was flooded, leaving its residents refugees in their own country. Meanwhile, the dam silted up more rapidly than expected due to massive Haitian deforestation, leaving it a useless breeding ground for malaria. In the end, the project just enriched a US company in the name of the Haitians it impoverished.

To the credit of the Haitian people, when the Canadian International Development Agency and the Inter-American Development Bank tried to build two more dams in the 1980s, ten thousand people stood up against the plan and against their own notoriously repressive government, and succeeded in putting enough pressure on the banks to halt the projects.

If you look at a satellite picture of the island of Hispaniola, it is easy to pick out the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, because Haiti was so massively deforested by European colonists. This deforestation has made every recent natural disaster much worse on the Haiti side of the island, because without trees the land washes away, burying roads and homes, and drinking water reservoirs are impossible to keep clean.

The overwhelming human tragedy of Haiti after the earthquake tears at our hearts. But in our response, we need to do more than just help the victims. We need to attack the underlying social, political and economic conditions that transformed a natural earthquake into a human disaster. We demand no more Haitis — people in the US and the developed world shouldn’t be living high on the hog while a majority of the world’s population barely has the resources to eat, much less prepare for natural disasters.

Many people want to donate money to help with disaster relief. The following groups are based in Haiti, run by Haitians, were active there before the earthquake, and will remain after the TV cameras have left. Helping Haitians help themselves is better than funding huge US based corporate-style charities.

• Aristide Foundation – medical facility run by Haitian doctors, students and Cuban doctors www.haitiaction.net

• Partners In Health (Zanmi Lasante) – one of the largest health care delivery services in Haiti staffed and managed by Haitians with a full training program for Haitians to become doctors and other health professionals: www.pih.org

• Institute For Justice And Democracy In Haiti – distributes objective and accurate information on human rights conditions in Haiti and pursues legal cases with local human rights groups www.ijdh.org

• Working Together For Haiti (Konbit Pou Ayiti) – focuses on Haitian solutions to environmental, social and economic problems by providing training and funding to community-based projects. www.konpay.org

“Horrible news – its like someone dying – i can’t help but feel every minute i spend on this fucking computer is helping to destroy wonderful things such as HAND LAYOUT”

— 1:51 a.m. email from Eggplant

This issue marks the end of an era — it is the first issue that Slingshot has had to be “processed” through a computer before it reached your hands. In early January, Slingshot’s newspaper printer since 1988 told us that they had gotten rid of their camera and that they were only accepting newspaper copy in digital form. Until this issue, we would make a “camera ready” layout by hand, the printer would take a photograph of it on a huge camera, create a huge negative, and use that to burn printing plates that would then print the paper. Without a camera, the printer now burns the plates directly from a computer print out. [Note: the printer for the Organizer still has their camera so that publication is still old school.]

This is basically a symbolic loss; our friend Sandi offered to help us continue doing hand layout by scanning our camera-ready originals and emailing them to the printing press. But like Eggplant says, this is another step in the march of progress which always brings us more technology and allegedly more efficiency, but which never considers whether we want to actually live in the homogenized, soulless world that is emerging. It’s easy to get caught up in the march of progress and excited by each new shiny gadget and forget that you’re an animal — a living thing — with needs and desires far more complex, interesting and meaningful than making everything fast, efficient, easy and cheap.

The process of making Slingshot is different from how most printed publications are made these days — we still do it mostly by hand, using computers as little as we can. We physically cut, manipulate and glue back together pieces of paper to make a collage — text, artwork and headlines — that become each page of the paper. This is how publications were designed before computer layout, and after the demise of setting type on pieces of lead. Our production method means we have a collection of scissors, razor blades, pens, a waxer to glue stuff together, rolls of line tape, and huge piles of art we can cut up.

Some of these hand-layout tools are now endangered — they are no longer being manufactured and you have to become something of an antique collector if you want to continue to use all the tools that used to exist to do layout this way.

So, we’ve decided to officially become antique collectors by asking everyone to send us their un-used hand-layout tools: particularly border tape, clip art books, waxers, zipatone film, rub-on letters or other cool hand-layout stuff we may not even know about yet. We want to build a living archive of these materials — to preserve tools as well as skills as we continue using them for their intended purpose.

How you do something and the tools you use help shape your experience and your thinking while you’re using those particular tools. We think that our use of these old-fashioned publication methods is both a product of our political and counter-cultural thinking, which is skeptical of the de-humanizing effects of the high-techization of our lives, as well as helping us develop these ideas in the first place.

Computers isolate people in front of their personal screen and divide them by rewarding ever-more division of labor and specialization in particular micro-specializations. Some people have special skills while everyone else is disempowered because they lack those skills. This process of stratification promotes individualism and competition and frustrates people building community, cooperation and equality.

When we use ancient tools to make Slingshot, these tools permit a more inclusive, cooperative and equal relationship between members of the collective since everyone has a more equal knowledge regarding the means of production. Everyone can cut stuff up and glue it back together — you learn this in grade school.

As a bonus, we achieve a diversity of style within the paper, rather than the drab standardization you see in a lot of publications these days. Even a lot of radical publications look like they are trying to imitate the slick computerized style of the corporate machine they are presumably opposing — how sad. These days more than ever, we are starved for forms of expression that haven’t been sterilized and computerized — that look like they were made by living human beings rather than machines.

When we make Slingshot, each person in the collective usually does 1-3 pages, so the look of the paper changes from page to page. We do it all together in a chaotic room — sort of like a party with razor blades and scraps of paper. This environment is engaging and cooperative — breaking down the loneliness it is so easy to feel in the standardized world of sitting in front of a computer screen. Unlike computers, other human beings tell jokes, give you a hard time, challenge your ideas, teach you things and help you when you need help.

They’ll give you a hug if you need one. Creating the paper becomes much more than a means to an end — it expresses a model for how we would like to reorganize the whole world.

You always hear how the internet is turning everyone into the media and opening up new opportunities for community, creativity and access — and maybe that is true in some ways — but this isn’t the only side of the story. People are in “community” sitting alone looking at a screen. Their creativity is expressed in narrowly constrained technological forms of media expression.

The mainstream society always seeks the newest technology and the most efficient tools. But you don’t have to use these gadgets just because they exist — newer and more efficient is not always better. It is crucial to ask how each technology, tool or method makes you feel and how it impacts your relationships with others and the earth. When you start asking these questions about every technology, you start realizing how often new technology exists not to benefit the user, society or the earth, but just to enable a corporation to sell stuff.

The whole idea of efficiency is suspect — why do we always want to do everything faster? Maybe the joy of doing something slow and really engaging with it and experiencing the process is the essence of being alive — is the key to leading a meaningful life. Processes that are tough and complex can make you feel way more alive, competent and satisfied than stuff that seems easy because it has been pre-digested, computerized and managed for you by a corporation. And having everything easy can come with invisible environmental and social costs — using lots of oil, chemicals, transnational transportation and cheap labor from the third world.

If you fly an airplane across the USA, you will not know the USA. If you walk, bike and hitch, you will have really traveled. Who wants to make love as fast as possible when you could spend a lazy morning at it?

So in the spirit of slow lovin’, send us your clip art books and bordertape. Or better yet, figure out how to use them yourself and step back from computerizing every last bit of your life.

Food Not Bombs has won, it is more commonly accepted than hated. Despite intense police repression, terrorist watch lists, and the stigma that is common fare towards homeless and the poor — most people who have heard of it think it is okay to feed people for free. It has a simple straightforward model that can be replicated all over the planet — and it has.

Bay Area Food Not Bombs may be a model organization that other places can look to with envy. It’s located in an intelligent and active urban environment that has a largely sympathetic population. It is close to excellent farms and food producers who donate plenty of eats. Long-running and consistent servings further solidify its place on the streets and in our hearts.

Oakland Food Not Bombs now has one more day of hot meals cooked and dished out to folks. This is at 32nd & San Pablo Ave. and has been going strong for 6 months. Despite initial concerns that this would detract from getting help for the Berkeley People’s Park serving that happens at the same time, so far it hasn’t. There is also a food give away on Thursday mornings in Downtown Oakland, which initially had the difficulty of getting the large crowd not to push and shove for the food — behavior that our enemies mislabel as “Anarchy.”

Also coming down the line for the East Bay chapter is a move to make the organization a stand-alone non-profit. For the past 16 years it has been under the umbrella of the Long Haul non-profit, which enables many places to legally donate to it. There is some reluctance from people who shun any paper work dictated by “THE MAN.” Now it is time for the organization to stand on its own feet. This may be a good time too, because funding from a major source has just been hit by the hard times that everyone is talking about. The Berkeley Flea Market has made a cut in the monthly donations it gives that helps to pay for essentials such as bulk grains and beans. This does not rule out the traditional means of grassroots fundraising. There is talk of doing benefit shows and a self-published cookbook that has a focus on making meals for large numbers of people — as well as an angle of food security. But it is a small miracle of daily creating a way out of no way that testifies how money can’t replace people power.

Then there is San Francisco Food Not Bombs. They have as an impressive long run of serving since January 1988 — which is after the whole thing started in 1980 in Boston. The 30th Anniversary celebration will take place in Boston on the weekend of May 23, but celebrations will happen in just about every city the organization operates out of — which is over a thousand cities. Now some people have set out to put together the San Francisco celebration of Soupstock. We must have food to live, and we must celebrate to mark the season change and to break from our work. Help is needed in planning the Anniversary. The thousands of details to be addressed are now being examined. Last year was poorly attended. But if people know it’s coming maybe more excitement will be generated. How much activity can you imagine? Stop by on Thursday nights at Station 40 (16th and Mission St.) to informally talk about it. People gather at 5pm to cook for the night’s serving. For further info you can also call Diamond Dave at 415-240-0286.

San Francisco faced the most brutal repression in the first few years of serving. The thinly veiled war against the poor did not convince the courts or the general public that food could not be given away for free. Nor has the FBI deterred the grassroots by claiming Food Not Bombs as a terrorist organization. We have something to learn from this. Even here in the city where the first Human Rights charter was signed, just as many human necessities are blatantly disregarded. Not that anarchists give a fart over the UN, but issues like shelter and peace have to be wrangled out of the hands of the lying-ass of government and brought back into our hands — as Food Not Bombs shows us with food distribution. Today is very dire with people living without shelter — without homes. 2009 saw over 100 deaths of homeless people in the state of California alone. Unnecessary suffering while a large amount of houses and buildings remain vacant. The most practical solution is to make squatting as common as giving out bread. Other problems facing our communities would be the need to have conflict resolution that isn’t administered by the police. Having a locally controlled alternative to Law Enforcement seems more necessary in view of the fact that the present structure has its roots in vigilantes organized by the ultra-rich. Police have not evolved much from terrorizing runaway slaves, and recently immigrated workers organizing themselves. These problems can be seriously looked at when the 30th Anniversary comes around with the conference and the dozen micro-gatherings that grow around the main event. And of course once we’re together the possibilities of our ideas and dreams can get collective help in actualizing them.

The climate change protest in San Francisco on November 30, 2009 — a coordinated global protest prior to the Copenhagen UN Climate conference — was more heartwarming than I had anticipated. It was a little hard dragging myself out of my routine and to the protest, and at first the chanting and signs felt forced and ritualized, but in the end the action succeeded and I left feeling energized. The climate crisis — rising greenhouse gas emissions, etc. — feel so overwhelming and disempowering. When you’re considering going to a protest like this, it seems utterly hopeless to believe that a few hundred people with signs in San Francisco could make any difference at all. Why waste time with the effort?

But there is something mysterious about actually participating in activism vs. just thinking about it. On paper, trying to change really complex, massive structures seems hopeless, but in practice, it feels one hell of a lot better to at least try something than to just give up. We marched down Market Street and to the Bank of America high-rise tower. My friend Kristi asked “why the B of A?” and it was a really good question. They are one corporation amongst thousands, all trying to maximize profits and willing to sacrifice the climate and the earth in the process. Like many others, they have lobbied against strong action on climate and for false solutions (clean coal, biofuels), and they invest in all kinds of disastrous activities. This are hardly unique.

But when we got there, the real reason became obvious. It really helps to personalize the struggle, if only to a huge concrete office tower. We rushed and blockaded the doors and even though it was just another symbolic protest — requiring a paragraph to link to the actual issues, which themselves require several paragraphs to explain — the action made the underlying conflict easy to understand. Confused business men tried to get through the door, and the looks on their faces were priceless. You could see the clash of worldviews. Are money and status, routine and order our real goal in this life? Or do our lives connect to something much deeper, which ultimately relates to the health of the planet that made our lives possible in the first place?

I’ve been to so many of these types of protests before — there is a certain routine and you can easily get jaded. But this time I didn’t feel like that at all. To the contrary, my regular life of going to work etc. has been making me feel bored and stuck. This feeling of the streets — the riot cops, the community struggling together, the closeness of being with other people willing to stand up whether it makes any damn difference or not — it felt strangely real, intense and sharp, as opposed to so much of normal life which feels like an illusion in slow motion.

We very thoroughly although briefly shut down that building and brought joyful chaos to the corporate canyons. Dancing and color and silliness and live music made the grim seriousness and “adultness” of the businessmen and the police look absurd. And it was impressive how few people it took to create such a big disruption — business as usual in a dense, modern, industrialized system is fragile and already right on the edge of collapse into chaos, requiring just a tiny push.

But I have no illusions. A tiny action like this alone can’t change the course of events. To do so will require a much broader popular uprising and a fundamental re-organization of the values and priorities that structure how things work.

What I think we accomplished was perhaps a tiny step in that direction. While maybe the people in power didn’t hear our protest, actually getting out in the streets changed those of us who participated. Maybe that change in mood, outlook and spirit can be infectious, spreading to those we’re connected to, and gradually moving the spirit of the whole community from one of resignation and depression to the kind of courage, inspiration and hopefulness we need to turn things around.

When I think back to my own life, I realize that what “normal” people consider success — getting ahead in terms of status and acquiring a bunch of possessions — is really on a fundamental level failure. It’s a failure to realize what is important and put that realization into action by living for the things that actually matter, which aren’t material things. Meaning is about experiences, relationships and having mental and emotional space to be aware of life going on around you. So many “successful” people forget to stop and notice their lives, and in the process they miss the whole thing.

Since what “normal” people consider success is really failure, then for us to achieve success on a human level may mean that we’re considered failures on a social and economic level. All the stuff you’re supposed to do — achieve status, secure material comfort — you risk giving up if you take pursuing a meaningful life seriously. If you really go for it and put your heart into alternatives to this dying system, it means giving up the types of comfort it has to offer in favor of pleasures that are off the grid.

One thing I noticed about the November 30 protest was how small it was. The organizers picked November 30 because it was the 10th anniversary of the huge protests that shut down the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle in 1999. I was in Seattle for the WTO protest and it was one of the hugest, most inspirational uprisings imaginable. “Normal” life was completely displaced by a massive demand for a future beyond more economic growth. But N30 in 2009 didn’t carry on the spirit of Seattle.

Looking around at the few dozen protesters dwarfed by the thousands of workers and shoppers in downtown San Francisco, my friend Sandi and I wondered why the climate crisis didn’t draw a bigger outpouring of concern. In fact, if the global climate significantly changes, disrupting all ecosystems on earth as well as all human societies which ultimately fundamentally depend on natural agricultural production, the climate crisis will make injustice related to globalization and the WTO look like small potatoes.

Something about the enormity of climate change is throwing people into a sense of defeat or denial — the problem is so overwhelming that we’re becoming paralyzed. Perhaps it’s because we’re all tied to climate change — we’re all responsible because there’s no way to exist in our society without constantly consuming fossil fuels. Do people feel that since they’re “unpure,” they can’t demand alternatives to fossil fuels? Are we unsure we’re ready for a fundamental transition which may up-end the privilege to which we’ve grown accustomed as members of rich, developed countries?

Or perhaps we’re numb because climate change is a long-term problem and a gradual process. Psychologically, we’re better able to react to sudden and dramatic disasters like the earthquake in Haiti than to creeping catastrophes. Perhaps the very vastness of the danger itself makes effective action difficult — the human brain can understand a specific problem like a sick cat or a traffic accident, but tends to zone out when it tries to think about millions of species going extinct because of the millions tons of CO2 people add to the atmosphere each day. Our minds haven’t evolved to really understand millions or billions or trillions.

A better understanding of the psychology of climate change is desperately needed. Hopefully some smart radical psychology folks are working on this right now . . .

Just two weeks after the November 30 protest, the UN Climate change talks in Copenhagen ended in failure. But even the most optimistic goals of the UN conference would probably have been a failure. The governments at Copenhagen — all tied to and representing economic and political elites — were pushing gradual, market-based, essentially business friendly solutions.

Given the limited choice between denialism/inac
tion on one hand and gradual, modest, sensible, “adult” reform on the other, we’re still generally at a stage of denial and paralysis.

It is still up to the people on the streets — the people who aren’t sensible, who aren’t tied into the realistic institutions of power, who aren’t burdened by success — to try to figure out a third way. This isn’t necessarily a new technology or a new political coalition or a new tactic or even a new set of values or ways of thinking — it may be so big as to be hard to recognize now when we’re in the middle of it. When people sort it out (or fail to do so) future historians will give it a name.

We have to create these new ideas — this transition — from scratch and put it on the table ourselves from outside the established channels. The structures of power and the status quo maintain their control by marginalizing any sense that people can define our own priorities and our own future. They like to pick the options — multiple choice, not essay.

Direct action in the streets — getting off your computer and out of your living room and outside your comfortable peer group of friends — isn’t just a tactic or a tool to pressure the outside world. Direct action is most important because of what it teaches us and how it changes us. It nourishes us, gives us courage, gives us hope and helps us see that there are options beyond the “objective” and “realistic” ones we can see before we step over the line. Something about actually participating and doing — not just thinking or discussing — is key. It feels almost hopeless to write this because you really have to experience it yourself in your own life to know what I mean.

And of course direct action isn’t the only way to acquire these insights. The direct action scene has its own pitfalls and limitations, and can devolve into its own isolated peer group.

Everyone in this society — from us to the people who work for banks and industries — have a range of choices. We can all be held accountable for looking at the climate and the future and changing, or figuring out how to try to maintain the status quo.

After Copenhagen, it is unclear what the next step will be — not just to regular people, but to the people “in charge” who organized Copenhagen. The sense of inaction, paralysis, and denial are in themselves powerful — they hide building social, ecological and psychological pressure, like a huge spring winding up and getting tighter. The tighter you wind a spring, the more energy it stores up waiting for release.

Trying to turn away or go about our business as if we can’t see what is happening isn’t a long-term solution. We all know that our planet is endangered and sagging under the weight of too much industry, too many emissions, and too many human beings always wanting more more more stuff.

I’m looking forward to the next climate change protest. On a good day, I’m feeling less afraid and less discouraged. I’m hopeful that staying engaged with what’s really important and connected to other people with similar awareness will give us all the inspiration to create something different and sustainable.

As non-renewable resources that are already becoming more difficult to exploit, fossil fuels are a doomed technology, and will gradually become more expensive as supplies dwindle until they finally run out. Aside from the supply question, burning fossil fuels adds carbon to the atmosphere, causing potentially devastating climate change. With these fatal defects in mind, it is particularly outrageous that Slingshot’s local utility, Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E), is moving forward with participation in a $2.2 billion dollar investment for a liquefied natural gas terminal and pipeline in Oregon. The proposed Jordan Cove terminal and the Pacific Connector pipeline will divert money that could be used to build renewable energy sources (like wind and solar) and will instead lock us into fossil fuel dependence for decades to come. There’s still time to stop this shortsighted fossil fuel investment and in so doing, attack the thinking that is behind similar projects world-wide. At this moment in history, energy investments should be for alternative technology, not more of the same fossil foolishness.

Think Globally, Struggle Locally

On December 17, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission — which has sole jurisdiction over the project and can trump local or state opposition — approved Jordan Cove and the Pacific connector pipeline by a 3 to 1 vote. PG&E are investing in the $1.2 billion pipeline, which will take years to complete. As proposed, the project would be capable of moving a billion cubic feet of natural gas daily from transnational tankers docking in Coos Bay, Oregon, through a 230 mile pipeline through Southern Oregon, and to customers in California, Nevada and the Pacific Northwest. Building the pipeline will require disruption of sensitive forest and water ecosystems along the route, leveling a total of 2,000 acres. The governor of Oregon, the SF Board of Supervisors, as well as folks near Coos Bay, all oppose the project. The project would be PG&E’s first use of imported Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG), a technology for moving and trading natural gas worldwide, the way oil is currently traded.

As described in more detail in Slingshot #95, natural gas is widely distributed around the planet. Currently, most natural gas is drilled relatively close to where it is used and then moved by pipeline. Current pipelines can’t easily move gas across oceans. Because the US has used huge amounts of natural gas over the last several decades, and because US gas use continues to increase, the big gas users (like electric utilities, which use about a third of US gas supplies to generate electricity) are worried that local supplies may eventually become scarce and more expensive. In the US, new gas drilling often uses more complex and expensive technology like “fracing”–pumping water under high pressure to the bottom of a well in order to fracture rock formations and release trapped gas supplies.

Meanwhile, there are huge, cheap gas supplies offshore in places like Peru, Russia, Algeria, Australia, Brunei, Indonesia, Libya, Malaysia, Nigeria, Oman, Qatar, Trinidad and Tobago. By super cooling gas to minus 259 degrees Fahrenheit, it can be liquefied so it can be loaded onto specially designed LNG ships and moved around like oil. When the gas is liquefied, it only takes up 1/600th the space it takes in a gaseous form.

Liquefying natural gas is expensive and uses massive amounts of energy, adding about 20 percent to the carbon footprint of LNG vs. traditional natural gas. While natural gas is considered a “green fuel” when compared to coal, burning gas still releases carbon. Burning coal releases 770-830 grams of CO2 per kilowatt hour of electricity, vs. 480-560 grams of CO2 per kwh for LNG and 400 grams of CO2 per kwh for regular natural gas.

Each LNG liquefication plants costs $1-3 billion, and each import terminal costs $500 million to $1 billion. This is of course money that could be spent on alternatives to burning gas in the first place, such as windmills or solar powerplants. LNG enables utilities to continue burning gas, rather than developing alternatives, even when local supplies are depleted to the extent that prices begin to rise. In fact, it is just such fossil fuel price increases (associated with depleted supplies) that make more expensive alternative energy sources look economically viable over the long-term. LNG short-circuits this gradual and automatic economic process.

PG&E currently has enough gas to meet demand. Their investment in the $1.2 billion Pacific Connector pipeline is a long-term bet on the future. And it’s the wrong bet — a bet on several more decades of generating most electricity using climate-changing fossil fuels, not zero emissions sources such as solar and wind. Because PG&E is a privately owned utility, its 15 million customers have no direct way to stop this decision — widespread and continuing public protest and pressure from Berkeley to Coos Bay, Oregon is our only hope.

Alternatives

PG&E wants to portray itself as a leader in alternative energy and their advertising is constantly emphasizing their investments in wind and solar technology. And in fact, PG&E is investing in a very promising solar thermal electrical generation project in the Mojave Desert — the Ivanpah project that is to be built by Oakland-based Brightsource Energy.

Unlike rooftop photovoltaic solar panels, which use high-tech materials to turn sun light directly into electricity, solar thermal harnesses heat from the sun to make steam, which turns turbines to generate electricity much like in a fossil-fueled powerplant. Solar thermal is potentially much cheaper and more efficient than photovoltaic panels, which are very expensive per kilowatt hour and which have a very low efficiency rate (i.e. the percent of the sun’s energy falling on the panel that is actually converted into electricity is low.)

In a solar thermal plant, mirrors focus sun on pipes containing liquid (sometimes water, but the liquid can also be a heat transfer chemical that can be heated hotter than water’s boiling point). Heat transfer liquid can potentially be heated to several hundred degrees Fahrenheit. While the Brightsource plant will only produce power when there is light to heat water, solar thermal plants that use a liquid other than water can super heat liquids that can be stored in tanks for use whenever electricity is needed — day or night.

It’s worth explaining how solar thermal works because not all alternative energy technologies are equal — each has its own problems and advantages. It may make sense to argue against some alternative technologies if they are particularly expensive or ecologically toxic. Just like LNG can eat up billions that could otherwise be invested in alternative energy, money put into less efficient alternative energy technologies isn’t available for the better ones. If we’re going to argue against using particular energy technologies like LNG, nuclear power, biofuels, etc, it is helpful if we can argue for alternative ways to generate electricity.

I’m particularly excited about solar thermal technology because it is relatively simple (and potentially cheap) and because there is a lot of sun available in a lot of places. But even solar thermal can be problematic since the mirrors take up space in desert areas that are usually extremely environmentally fragile. If utilities eventually build a lot of solar thermal plants, it’s important they be built on land that’s already been disturbed and in ways that allow for environmental recuperation. Sadly, humans have disturbed and destroyed a lot of land.

At the moment, fossil fuel production and combustion are the biggest threats to the environment. PG&E and other utilities are spending billions on protecting their access to fossil fuels for the long-term. Meanwhile, solar, wind and other alternatives get pennies.

For more information, check out www.PacificEnvironment.org.