Author: Slingshot Collective

Dumbfounded, I watched the toxic sunflowers sail over the fence — seeds, heads, stalks, and all. It was one more comic moment in the struggle to bring phytoremediation, the use of green plants to clean up toxic soil, out of the laboratory and into the hands of backyard and community gardeners. I hopped the fence, collected the plants from the empty lot, and routed them towards their proper new home, Milwaukee’s lined landfill.

Using sunflowers to clean lead out of soil has become popular in activist gardener circles, thanks in part to widely-publicized efforts by Common Ground volunteers in post-Katrina New Orleans. This past fall I visited two current phytoremediation (“fido-ree-mee-diation”) projects, and spoke with one of the founders of the 2006 Common Ground sunflower campaign. These activists are tackling soil toxicity head-on by growing sunflowers in lead-contaminated soil, harvesting them after the plants have sucked up some of the heavy metal, and disposing of them like hazardous waste. With every crop the soil gets cleaner.

Low-tech, low-cost tools for Do-It-Yourself soil remediation are desperately needed, and bioremediation might be the key: many plants, mushrooms, and bacteria can be used to take up toxic metals like arsenic and mercury, and break down organic chemicals like pesticides and diesel fuel. Traditional cleanup methods include removing toxic soil and putting it in a landfill or chemically washing it, techniques that are expensive, wasteful, and rarely benefit poor people. Lead in particular is a problem in urban areas where as much as twenty percent of children might face lower IQ’s, attention deficit disorders, and behavioral problems from high exposure. Furthermore, communities organizing to build food security need to restore soils full of leaded house paint, gasoline, and battery remains.

Phytoremediation is not new, but transferring the available research into good guidelines for smaller, DIY projects is tricky. For more than 20 years, capitalist heavyweights like the United States Military, Dow Chemical, Chevron, and Ford have been investing in the field. Most research has been done in controlled laboratory conditions, not in field experiments that reflect nature’s great variety. The published case studies that do exist are mostly industrial scale and report mixed results. Lead cleanup with sunflowers is chemistry, not magic; the process is affected by numerous variables, including soil pH, the form of lead in the soil, and the variety of sunflower used. Since phytoremediation is still experimental, soil testing is an important part of knowing whether it’s working. Although soil lead tests are cheaper than others, the expense of repeated testing is a common hurdle for low-income projects.

Despite the difficulties, sunflowers are a promising tool enabling people to take soil clean up into their own hands. Several positive, field-based test studies have been published recently in scientific journals, and one of the groups I interviewed for this article is doing their own New Orleans-specific experiment. Using phytoremediation safely doesn’t hurt the soil and probably helps, as Scott Kellogg and Stacy Pettigrew point out in their recently-published book, Toolbox for Sustainable City Living, which includes excellent guidelines for soil cleanup.

Milwaukee mix-up

I heard through the grapevine that an old friend of mine was working at a community health clinic in Milwaukee, WI, and was a part of a project using sunflowers to remediate the soil in the clinic’s garden for chronic care patients. I stopped by for a visit, excited to learn something from their project.

When I arrived, my friend told me that we could certainly visit the clinic garden, but there wasn’t much to see because the sunflowers were already harvested and in the compost pile. “What?” I replied, “You can’t put those sunflowers in the compost pile- they might be full of heavy metals!” A little knowledge can be dangerous, I realized. We got in touch with the head gardener and arranged to pull the contaminated plants out of the hopefully not-yet-frozen compost pile and put them in the dumpster.

On the next garden workday we biked the 8 miles under grey November skies down to the clinic. The clinic was sited on an old industrial site and the factory rubble had been topped with a thin layer of topsoil and sod. The garden beds were all raised, but sunflowers had been planted around them to clean up the soil around the beds. The paths were covered in woodchip in an effort to add organic matter and keep the potentially contaminated dust off the vegetables and away from children’s hands. I also learned that while they had researched the history of the site to understand the past soil contamination, they had not done any soil testing to see what was actually in the layer of topsoil, rendering their sunflower-based cleanup essentially a good-faith effort. Quite possibly the topsoil was clean since it had been brought in to cap the site.

Let’s be clear: lead is a heavy metal, an element, by definition something that cannot be broken down by plants. As we worked, we discussed the basics of phytoremediation. Some plants accumulate toxic elements like lead, cadmium, mercury, and arsenic, requiring that the plant be harvested and disposed of in some appropriate manner. Other contaminants, like diesel fuel, pesticides, and fertilizers — which are organic compounds made of chains of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and possibly other atoms like chlorine — can be broken down into harmless carbon-based compounds by secreted root enzymes and microbial activity hosted by some roots, as well as by some mushrooms. When the clinic gardeners put the sunflowers in the compost pile, they were essentially adding heavy metals to the compost that would later be mixed into the raised beds.

There is quite a bit of debate about what to do with harvested toxic plants, especially in the DIY community. Industrially, plants may be incinerated, composted, or chemically treated to leach out the heavy metals. If you don’t live near an old mine shaft, appropriate disposal means at the very least making sure the bagged plant material goes to a lined landfill, or possibly taking it to household hazardous waste sites. It could also be carefully composted before disposal, but only in a separate, enclosed area, to prevent the lead from leaching out as the plants break down.

At the clinic, the sunflowers heads were still fully seeded even though it was late fall. We wondered if the plants transmitted any heavy metal load into the seeds, and if animals had shied away from the seeds due to a potential bad taste. I later read that there is some evidence suggesting that seeds of sunflower plants used for remediation have an almost negligible amount of heavy metals, which would still make it a bad idea to eat them, but would allow the oil to be used for industrial purposes (Madejon et al). I also read that animals do seem to avoid plants naturally high in heavy metals due to their bad taste (Henry). When I saw my friend’s co-worker throwing the plants over the fence in that misguided attempt to seed sunflowers in the empty lot, I realized again how complicated the issue is. Safe phytoremediation means posting signs advising against eating the plants, and emphasizing that the plants are toxic once they’ve done their job.

Old toxins, new energy

Hurricane Katrina didn’t necessarily bring more lead to New Orleans’ already toxic soil. It did, however, bring a flood of volunteer energy geared towards finding creative, accessible techniques for cleaning up the city at the mouth of the entire Mississippi basin. One of the projects started by Common Ground Relief volunteers was the Meg Perry Healthy Soil Project, which ran a sunflower-planting campaign in 2006. After I witnessed the confusion around bioremediation in Milwaukee, I wanted to find out more about one of the first well-publicized activist uses of sunflowers for lead cleanup.
I tracked down Emily Posner, one of the founders of the project along with veteran gardeners Starhawk, Lisa Fithian, and Scott Kellogg of the Austin-based Rhizome Collective.

One of the first things Healthy Soil Project volunteers did was independently verify the post-Katrina soil analysis done by the EPA and the Natural Resources Defense Council. Already-high lead concentrations had been spread around by the floodwaters. In 2006, forty percent of New Orleans properties were in areas with soil lead content over the EPA residential limit of 400 mg Pb/kg soil. Common Ground recommends following lower limits: the Canadian standard for children’s play areas is 140 mg/kg soil lead, while the agricultural soil lead limit is 11 mg/kg!

The sunflower project really got off the ground during Spring Break when volunteers planted sunflowers in people’s yards and adjacent empty lots. There are a number of plants that accumulate lead, including Indian and Japanese mustard, scented geraniums, corn, penny cress, and sunflowers. Emily said they chose sunflowers for the summer project because “sunflowers can grow much better than Indian mustard down here in the summer time. You can’t really use Indian mustard because it’s too hot; they’re a brassica.” Eventually they used Indian mustard during the cooler winter months, in a two-pronged approach.

The Healthy Soil project chose Giant sunflowers because of their prolific roots systems. Wide-spread root systems are important for two reasons. First, experiments are still being done to determine where exactly the lead ends up in a sunflower plant. While it’s more desirable for the lead to be transported up into the stalk and leaves, making it easier to harvest the sunflowers without worrying about pulling up the roots, I found several studies indicating that a generous portion of lead remains in sunflower roots (Nehnevajova et al 2007; Rock 2003). Sunflowers have a strong tap root that can penetrate down 6.5 ft, and an extensive lateral spread of root near the surface. Phytoremediation is only effective in the root zone, which typically includes 8-10 inches of soil below the surface, where most soil contamination usually is. Perhaps sunflowers are effective at removing lead from deeper soil horizons with their branched taproot. Pulling up a long taproot is not realistic, but it is important to include as many roots as possible when the plants are harvested.

Extensive root systems also help combat potential groundwater contamination during cleanup efforts. One challenge with lead is that it is “molecularly sticky”: lead wants to be attached to something, whether it’s joining with soil organic matter, clay particles, or forming complexes with carbonates, phosphates, and other soil molecules. There are very few free lead cations (Pb2+) available in the soil for plants to uptake. What lead the plant does absorb tends to complex with plant nutrients in the roots, instead of traveling up into the plant shoots. In other words, lead is not very bioavailable.

Fortunately, soil amendments can be added to make the soil more acidic, ideally with a pH around 5.0, which makes the lead more soluble while still allowing plant growth. Backyard gardeners can add sulfur, coffee grounds, or pine needles. Many published case studies and industrial operations use synthetic chelating agents like EDTA (ethylene-diamine tetraacetic acid), which are organic compounds that surround metals to inactivate them, preventing metal atoms from precipitating with soil molecules, for example. One of the great quandaries of metal phytoremediation is that soluble lead that is bioavailable to plants is also bioavailable to humans, and available to contaminate groundwater. It is particularly easy to add too much EDTA and essentially just leach all the lead into the groundwater, instead of making it gradually available to plants at the rate they can absorb it.

“Everyone recommends adjusting the pH. We tried to do that with sulfur,” Emily said. “One strategy we used to try to confront [groundwater contamination] was that we did a massive, almost scatterseed project so the root systems of the sunflowers really dominated the plots of land.”

In late summer 2006 they harvested the sunflowers with machetes, making sure to get the whole plant including the roots, and chose to contain the potentially contaminated plants in plastic bags and dispose of the bags in a lined landfill. “That’s a huge debate, what to do with the plants now that they’ve accumulated lead,” Emily noted. “Our solution isn’t the best solution but we had no other choice really. Some folks would say you should do some composting [of the contaminated plants in an isolated pile] and then contain the lead in that spot. But resource and space-wise we thought it would be best for us to have it contained with all the other toxic shit that’s in landfills.”

A major part of any clean-up project is follow-up soil testing, but it was hard for the Healthy Soil project to accomplish this due to issues with funding and personnel. “One of the mistakes I learned was that . . . gardens are long term. . . . You put a seed in the ground and you have to wait 40 to 120 days for it to produce, and you have to take care of it the whole time. It’s a constant project; it’s hard to have that kind of sustained interest. But the financial thing was also a huge barrier. It was hard to keep going when we were having trouble doing follow-up testing. We couldn’t necessarily produce our results. . . . Our biggest impediment is . . . develop[ing] a more scientific understanding of what’s going on. Some people say that it works and some say that it doesn’t, and I can’t necessarily answer that question based off of our experience, …because soil testing is so expensive.” With a soil heavy metal test running $30 at the well-respected UMASS Amherst soil testing laboratory, for example, it is easy to see how the repeated testing needed to build a good foundation of data could have been cost-prohibitive.

Critics of the Common Ground project with whom I spoke in New Orleans felt Common Ground’s efforts channeling outside volunteers into solidarity relief efforts made the project less interesting and accessible to city residents, who might have had the long-term commitment necessary to help the project reach a fuller potential. Although the sunflower project is long over, local involvement is something the Healthy Soil Project is addressing with their new focus on community gardens. An active member of the Lower Ninth Ward Urban Farming Coalition, they still provide soil testing to residents looking to start gardens.

Despite the fact that the amount of lead removed from the soil remains unknown, Emily counts the project a success. “Whether it removed a ton of lead or it didn’t, it certainly added to the regeneration of soil by adding to the microbial life through the compost tea that we added, and by turning the soil and getting it uncompacted. Based off of scientific evidence I know we were adding some more life to the soil, as well as adding more life to the community. We were planting some of these lots in places that were so destroyed and devastated; for people to come across lots in places that were filled with sunflowers in bloom I think was a really powerful experience. . . . This type of activity adds life and proves that life can come in some of the most unusual places. I think that was a good stepping-stone for us to establish ourselves, our roots metaphorically and the fact that we do care about healthy soil and we care about having food access. Now we have an opening to be able to work under the guidance of local people who are taking care of some of this land. It’s been a really good experience in that way.”

Filling in research gaps

Across town from the Lower Ninth Ward where Common Ground Relief is based, a community coalition is attempting to answer some of the questions surrounding the efficacy of using sunflowers for lead cleanup. On a sunny afternoon in early December I met Bric
e White, one of the coalition members, at a test plot on a street corner a mile west of Downtown. Brice is the Operations Manager for the People’s Environmental Center (PEC), an organization started after the storm with the goal of making soil testing accessible to the people of New Orleans. Like many groups started in the post-hurricane ferment of 2005-6, PEC has gone through many changes; now their main focus is supporting this sunflower experiment along with students from Dillard University, where the Director of PEC, Dr. Lovell Agwarmgbo, teaches chemistry; students from Delgado Community College; and the New Orleans Food and Farm Network.

Thanks to New Orleans’ long growing season, all the sunflowers had been harvested mere weeks before I visited, and were in the lab awaiting analysis. The project, started this past spring, is the next logical step in Katrina clean-up: “Everybody was talking about remediation after the storm, what the contaminants were, and doing a lot of testing. . . . We decided to find a place were we could test out sunflowers to see if they actually worked. Sunflowers became the thing for everybody to use, to talk about and plant,” Brice explained. “I was discouraged . . . with people coming from the radical hippie punk thing, where they’re like, ‘If you plant the plants it gets rid of the lead!’ But when you look at lead, which is a metal, it doesn’t go anywhere. People don’t even think that far, they just think ‘sunflowers get rid of lead.'”

Brice eventually developed a positive working relationship with Healthy Soil Project phytoremediators, although initially he shared Emily’s concerns about Common Ground’s approach to the sunflower campaign. “I had a lot of backlash against Common Ground . . . for several reasons, about this sort of North-South divide, liberal people coming down to say they know what to do — it’s kind of a classic, too. Some of those people didn’t mean that, but they didn’t stay here long enough to really see projects through. A lot of it’s an organizational problem. But for whatever reason, a lot of sunflowers got planted in New Orleans after Katrina…” This was fine, he pointed out, but any phytoremediation project needs a caveat: “If you’re actually trying to remediate, there’s just not much data. …You can’t plant sunflowers and then say that somehow there’s less lead . . . if you haven’t done testing to at least get a sense of what it does.”

PEC and other coalition members saw an opportunity to fill in some of the research gaps when a donation of sunflower Seedballz arrived. The gift was a trademarked version of a standard seedball with sunflower seeds rolled into a ball of clay to make them easy to grow. Through their connections with Dillard University, the coalition has the testing facilities that the Healthy Soil Project struggled to access.

The test plot is a corner lot on Oretha Castle Haley Boulevard that was donated to Café Reconcile, a job-training organization for young people. In exchange for upkeep, they were happy to have the lot used as a test site. With a history of several houses now torn down, illegally parked vehicles, and illegal dumping of house foundation material, the lot is typical of New Orleans. Because the study hasn’t yet been published, Brice couldn’t tell me any specific lead content numbers, but presumably they reflect the fairly high background levels of lead in the city.

One early lesson learned was that community-oriented science isn’t easy. Brice and his fellow coalition members encountered numerous difficulties in the process of turning the rubble-filled lot into a functioning field experiment. After trying to till it themselves, they were forced to hire a bulldozer to level the lot. Despite the addition of weed fabric, it was hard to control weeds in the nine experiment plots in the voracious New Orleans environment. The Seedballz didn’t perform well; the hot summer sun baked the clay into a hard ball, and birds picked out the seeds as the balls sat on top of the soil. “Figuring out how to get them to germinate was the real success,” noted Brice. Eventually they ended up burying the seedballs and also planting a crop of black oil sunflower seeds in an effort to not tie the project to one specific patented product, one donation.

Additionally, there was no record of the type of sunflowers in the Seedballz, and type of sunflower does seem to be an important variable in lead uptake. Researchers in Zurich, Switzerland examined the toxic metal accumulation in fifteen sunflower cultivars grown in a field contaminated with sewage sludge (Nehnevajova et. al). Because some metal uptake also varies with the kind of fertilizer used to reduce the pH, they used two different soil amendments, ammonium sulfate and ammonium nitrate. Surprisingly, they reported a wide variety in lead accumulation — almost 10 percent. The most lead, 26.5 mg/kg Dry Weight, accumulated in the Salut cultivar, when the plants were fertilized with ammonium sulfate, while the least amount of lead, only 2.8 mg/kg Dry Weight, was found in the cultivar Alzan, also grown with ammonium sulfate. To make matters more confusing, some cultivars accumulated more lead with the ammonium nitrate fertilizer than they did with ammonium sulfate. Neither of the varieties used in New Orleans, the Giant and Black Oil sunflowers, were included in the study, which used varieties widely available in Switzerland.

Despite the difficulties and multiple variables in the project, Brice said their preliminary results indicate a promising reduction in soil lead content. The study opens the door for future research with a New Orleans, community-based focus. “A lot of people have said they don’t want to use phytoremediation because they say it’s too slow,” he pointed out, “but we thought the results from 1-2 crops were promising enough to possibly use it. Also, the growing season here is longer than a lot of places. If you started first thing in the spring, you could maybe get four crops of sunflowers in. But in a place in the Northeast where they said it was too slow, they probably only got one crop in. All these things are things to look into in the future.” There are other questions as well: “When do you harvest them to get optimum efficiency? Is there lead in the seeds? Are animals eating the seeds, are people eating the seeds?… The simple thing we want to know is, did it take the lead out, and if so, is the first step that you can plant [sunflowers] and harvest them, and make sure you throw them away. Maybe that is a good start. Like all the Common Ground stuff — if they actually knew there was lead, and they planted all these sunflowers and then harvested them, they certainly didn’t hurt anything, and they probably made it better.”

Community-oriented science

In addition to providing valuable data on sunflowers, this project is a good exercise in community-oriented science. I salute Emily, Brice, and all the other intrepid gardeners who are vastly expanding the field conditions under which phytoremediation is used experimentally. By keeping track of what works under what conditions, and doing soil testing when it’s available, we can turn our DIY efforts into a solid body of knowledge created by the communities it serves. This is an excellent example of science working for the people. While we build bridges with sympathetic members of the scientific establishment, we can work towards organizing our own radical science infrastructure, like accessible soil testing labs. Let’s free bioremediation from the clutches of bureaucracy and academia! Bioremediation is a natural chemical process. No doubt there are other tools in the ground that we can use to repair the effects of industrialization, if we take the time to understand them.

Thank you to Emily and Brice for the interviews!

Resources:

Toolbox for Sustainable City Living, Scott Kellogg and Stacy Pettigrew, South End Press

Gardener’s Remediation Guide, EPA (just being published; contact ely.charlotte@epa.gov)

C
ommon Ground Relief, www.commongroundrelief.org

People’s Environmental Center, Brice White, Operations Manager, xbricex@hotmail.com

References

Hetland, M., Gallagher, J., Daly, D., Hassett, D., and Heebink, L. 2001. Processing of plants used to phytoremediate contaminated sites. In Phytoremediation, Wetlands, and Sediments, Leeson, A. et al. eds. Battelle Press.

Henry, Jeanna. 2000. An Overview of the Phytoremediation of Lead and Mercury. EPA, www.clu-in.org.

Feigl, J. et al. A resource guide: The phytoremediation of lead in urban, residential soils. http://www.civil.northwestern.edu/EHE/HTML_KAG/Kimweb/MEOP/INDEX.HTM

Madejon, P., Murillo, J.M., Maranon, T., Cabrera, F., and Soriano, M.A. 2003. Trace element and nutrient accumulation in sunflower plants two years after the Aznacollar mine spill. Sci.Total.Environ. 307, 239-257.

Nehnevajova, E., Herzig, R., Federer, G., Erismann, K.-H., and Schwitzguebel, J.-P. 2005. Screening of sunflower cultivars for metal phytoextraction in a contaminated field prior to mutagenesis. Internat. Journal of Phytoremediation, 7: 337-349.

Nehnevajova, E., Herzig, R., Federer, G., Erismann, K.-H., and Schwitzguebel, J.-P. 2007. Chemical mutagenesis — A promising technique to increase metal concentration and extraction in sunflowers. Internat. Journal of Phytoremediation, 9:149-165.

Rock, S.A. 2003. Field evaluations of phytotechnologies. In Phytoremediation: Transformation and Control of Contaminants, McCutcheon, S. and Schnoor, J. eds. John Wiley and Sons, Inc.

By PB Floyd

Fossil Fools day — Wednesday, April 1 — is your chance to put climate change back on the agenda by organizing and participating in creative, decentralized, inspired protests, blockades, street theater and organized pranks on the fossil fuel industry. With all the media hype about the world economic collapse, it can be hard to remember that something more important than banks and auto companies is at grave risk — the planet’s ecological balance is on the line. Politicians are rushing to spend trillions of dollars to restore profits and economic growth, but pitifully little is being done to break the human addiction to fossil fuels. Thousands of people will rise up with simultaneous actions on April 1 to try to re-focus attention on the real global crisis.

Pull a prank that packs a punch

Actions using non-traditional, funny-yet-in-your-face tactics like the ones held on fossil fools day are particularly effective because they are decentralized and diverse. In 2008 there were about 150 actions on four continents. Just a few folks can organize a modest action with funny signs, disguises, and gags like folks in Edinburgh, Scotland, where a group of clowns invaded supermarkets to try to locate the elusive Scottish banana to point out the absurdity of using fossil fuels to fly food to Scotland in the middle of winter. In Berkeley last year, a handful of us had a bike parade to gas stations which required hardly any organizing, time or money, but which was really effective in making people stop and think about fossil fuel consumption. Better organized folks tried more disruptive actions like the numerous blockades of coal-fired power plants last year.

Fossil fools day is a do-it-yourself opportunity — you don’t have to join some big structure or have a lot of fancy credentials — you can just gather your friends and get to it. In a world exhausted by boring, soulless protest rituals that are easily ignored, humor is a powerful weapon. Big corporations may control the media and the government, but saying something in a funny or unusual way can break through the static, complacency and hopelessness. Especially at this time of disruption and yearning for change, grassroots actions are essential and may be unusually effective.

Fossil Fools actions in 2009 are likely to focus on the numerous false solutions being offered by various corporate interests and politicians and the inadequate response offered by world governments who proclaim they are concerned by climate change, including the incoming Obama Administration. It is instructive to compare the timid, gradual response to climate change with the massive and rapid response to the economic crisis. No politician is suggesting it is too expensive to help banks, nor are any suggesting a target of reducing the recession 20 percent by 2030. But that is precisely the bullshit you hear about global warming.

Why is every politician united around taking aggressive action on the economy while they dither about the environment? Everyone knows the economy will eventually come back — it is called the business cycle for a reason. The same can’t be said about climate change. Atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) have increased from 280 to 380 parts per million since fossil fuel combustion began in the industrial revolution in the 1800s — C02 levels are now higher than they has been for 750,000 of years (Jonathan, 2006.) Without dramatic action, these gases will continue to accumulate, causing mass species extinctions as well as human famine, social dislocation and suffering. Green house gas emissions continue to climb dramatically, despite the last few years of rhetorical concern and despite all the greenwashing advertising campaigns and claims by ski resorts that they are carbon neutral.

No matter which ecosystem or creature fills you with awe and a sense of the meaning of your own existence — the silent redwood groves, the polar bear, the coral reefs, glaciers or the rainforest — they are at grave risk if people keep burning fossil fuels as usual. Climate change is the real global crisis.

Climate Feedback Loops

There is growing evidence that global warming is already triggering climatic feedback loop effects that will cause climate change faster than projected purely from human emissions of greenhouse gasses. For instance, as temperatures warm, permafrost in the Arctic is melting at alarming rates, releasing millions of tons of methane gas, which is a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than the carbon dioxide released when humans burn fossil fuels. Another example of a feedback loop is how warming reduces Arctic ice exposing more dark colored water to absorb sunlight, with less white ice that reflects the light, thus trapping even more heat and speeding up climate change.

At a certain point, these feedback loops may gain such momentum that even if humans dramatically cut their emissions of greenhouse gases in a few decades, climate change will continue to increase. Scientists call this the tipping point — the point where natural feedback loops propel climate change out of human control. No one knows when the tipping point will be reached — or whether it has already been reached — but the need to avoid reaching it means cutting greenhouse gas emissions now, not in 2050 or at some long-off date, is crucial.

The real goal isn’t to cut emissions to 1990 levels (ala the Kyoto Protocol) or some artificial target — the goal is zero human emissions now. That means entirely replacing our industrial culture’s dependence on fossil fuels. In the USA, about 40 percent of emissions are generated to generate electricity, and another 40 percent are for transportation fuel. Cutting these emissions requires a much more dramatic shift than screwing in a light bulb or driving a Prius — the point of consumption. The key is shifting the supply side — replacing oil, gas and coal as fuels in the first place.

While Obama is giving lip service to addressing climate change, his proposals are pathetically timid — a few billion dollars, inadequate targets and slow timetables. He is pushing a number of false solutions to climate change — “alternative” technologies like “clean” coal, nuclear, and biofuels that are either unproven, cause other forms of ecological damage, won’t reduce over-all emissions, or all of the above. With climate change already causing ecological damage, there isn’t time to waste on dead-end false solutions.

The Clean Coal Myth

Obama’s constant discussion of clean coal merits special criticism. His campaign literature stated: “Develop and Deploy Clean Coal Technology . . . An Obama administration will provide incentives to accelerate private sector investment in commercial scale zero-carbon coal facilities. In order to maximize the speed with which we advance this critical technology, Barack Obama and Joe Biden will instruct DOE [Department of Energy] to enter into public private partnerships to develop 5 ‘first-of-a-kind’ commercial scale coal-fired plants with carbon capture and sequestration.”

The problem is, there is no such thing as clean coal — it is a marketing gimmick created by the coal industry. The reason coal is an attractive fuel is that it is extremely cheap to mine and burn. The reason Obama discusses clean coal is because the coal industry is immensely powerful and the USA has a huge supply of coal. But the inconvenient truth is that coal has to be phased out as a fuel source if humans are to avoid climate change. Coal is by far the dirtiest of the fossil fuels in terms of C02 emitted per unit of energy.

The idea behind clean coal technology is that the C02 released when coal is burned could be captured and then stored underground — so called carbon capture and sequestration. The problem is, no one has figured out a way to capture carbon economically on the scale at which coal is burned — millions of tons. Capturing the carbon dioxide gen
erated from burning coal is extremely complex and expensive. Even if you could capture all the carbon inexpensively enough to make it feasible (which appears highly unlikely), getting rid of the immense volume of gas so that it wouldn’t leak back into the atmosphere or pollute underground water sources is a problem.

In 2008, the US Department of Energy withdrew funding from FutureGen, a 275-megawatt coal fired power plant that was to have captured all of the CO2 emitted from burning coal, because of higher than expected costs. The public-private partnership, which never begin construction, is hoping to get a new chance at life under the Obama administration.

By the time you spend all the extra money to build new coal burning plants and develop infrastructure to get rid of the carbon dioxide underground, electricity from coal is no longer so cheap. It could end up being more expensive than solar or wind, which are increasingly price competitive with fossil fueled electricity already.

This says nothing of the other dirty aspects of mining coal. Increasingly, USA coal is strip mined or mined using mountaintop removal methods, both of which obliterate the environment in the process. The recent spill of 5.4 million cubic yards of toxic fly ash from the Tennessee Valley Authority’s (TVA) Kingston Fossil Plant in Tennessee is just a tiny example of the vast scale of pollution associated with the coal industry. Fly ash is what is left after you burn coal — the spill at Kingston covered 400 acres and flowed into the Clinch and Tennessee Rivers.

The coal industry is using the theoretical possibility that coal could someday be burned without emitting disastrous amounts of C02 as an excuse to avoid limitations on the coal industry now. While discussion goes on, millions of tons of coal are being burned — none of it in a clean fashion. Hundreds of new coal fired power plants — none of them clean — are being built around the world. This is to say nothing of new mines and trans-national shipping facilities. Did you know that the USA exported 59 million tons of coal in 2008 according to the Energy Information Administration? All of this investment in coal will only make it harder to phase out coal as it becomes increasingly clear that clean coal is a cruel myth. Meanwhile, money and time that could be invested in clean technologies like solar and wind NOW continued to be poured into coal.

Direct Action Gets the Goods

Public awareness of climate change has been building for years, but the scope of the technological, political and economic response — as opposed to the rhetorical response — has remained minimal. Some people are experiencing crisis fatigue, figuring, “We’re already doomed, it is too late to do anything, we may as well not worry about it and have fun while human societies last. . . ” Although no one knows how dramatically the environment has already been damaged, grassroots action to address the problem at this moment is still crucial. Concluding we’re already fucked will be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Our action is worth it if there is even a chance to avert climate/ecological disaster.

While the economic collapse has taken the focus off global warming and the hype around the incoming Obama administration has allowed Obama to get away with a timid, vague plan, both of these factors may create special opportunities for grassroots action on climate change right now to be effective. Just like a lot of new infrastructure was built during the Great Depression to create jobs, the recession could be a great time to convert the fossil fueled economy to wind and solar power. Going beyond business as usual and standard band-aid solutions — like bailing out an auto industry that has resisted alternatives to fossil fuels since the oil shocks in the early 1970s — will require grassroots pressure and organizing. Obama is sexy but cautious and mainstream — he isn’t moving to make the kind of historic changes that are required.

Which is where actions like fossil fools day come in. Fossil Fools day comes out of the direct action, grassroots, radical environmental movement. Real dramatic change — replacing a worn-out, unsustainable way of life with something entirely new — won’t come from politicians, big business, or Hollywood movies. It will take radical vision — understanding new ways of living that are more humanistic, more fun, more gentle, localized and small-scale, and thus more in-tune with the cycles of life. We need new thinking to transition away from the fossil fueled “use it once and throw away” mentality we have all grown up with. Radical change requires disruption of the agenda of those in charge, not just asking for a seat at the table or going along for the ride. Change will come when the status quo can no longer continue.

In 2008, fossil fools day actions “spanned the full spectrum from the simply subversive to the downright disruptive: office occupations, banner drops, street theater, Big Carbon blockades, city center parades, spoof product launches, subvertising, leaflets, lock-downs,” according to Rising Tide North America. “Oil, gas, coal and aviation were all targeted. Fossil fuel extraction, production, financing, PR and greenwash all felt the jester’s wrath.” Since every aspect of our lives — from our food to our housing, to our jobs, to our transport to the way cities are designed — are related to the fossil fuel addiction, every neighborhood has appropriate targets.

Disruptive actions raise the economic cost of the fossil fuel lifestyle — this is one of the only languages the corporate political structure understands. Fossil fuels dominate our lives because they are efficient in the short term — they make things seem easy and instant by exporting the costs and harms to where they can’t be seen, or to the future. Fossil Fools day aims to expose this false ease and efficiency by connecting the harm to fossil fueled machines and ways of life. The point isn’t to impose guilt — often the mark of ill-calculated, careless activist efforts that divide us from those who can be our allies. Rather, clever pranks can put a smile on all of our faces, because ultimately we’re all dependent on fossil fuels, and we all have to abandon them together.

In Berkeley, those of us who did a bike parade last year have been thinking of ways to expose the greenwash and fake alternatives associated with the huge biofuel research industry at the University of California, Berkeley funded by oil-giant BP. What will you do in your town? Think zany, beautiful and for yourself. If no one has ever tried it before, that may be the best possible option. The joke is yours to make April 1.

For more info, updates, and ideas, check out fossilfoolsday.org. Or in Berkeley, email us at Berkeleyfossilfools@riseup.net.

Slingshot is an independent radical newspaper published in Berkeley since 1988.

Making this issue was an exciting yo-yo. During editing weekend, there were a dozen people and a lot of good articles actually turned in on time! But then a week later right before layout started, it looked like just a handful of us were available to do 20 pages. Imagine our collective surprise when an overflow crowd of people showed up from all directions to make the paper happen in terrific style — some people we already knew and a bunch of folks whom we had the pleasure of meeting for the first time.

How many people out there may be looking for opportunities to plug into collective projects like publishing Slingshot? Sometimes it can feel like there’s barely enough energy to keep a handful of alternative projects afloat, but just below the surface there are hidden reservoirs of energy just aching to express themselves. Like throwing a message in a bottle into the ocean, we need to take the risk of seeking community, engagement and action. And we hope this applies to direct actions of all kinds, not just publishing zines.

The protests that turned into riots to protest the murder of Oscar Grant could be a preview of things to come this year. People are straining on the sidewalks, ready to take the street. If you’ve been imagining building that community garden, starting that free clinic, carrying that sign or erecting that barricade, this is the year to turn your dream into reality.

• • •

We had an unusually large number of article submissions for this issue and had to cut a number of them because there wasn’t enough space. In the computer age, less and less materials get physically published on paper — where physical space is a limitation — and more and more writing ends up on-line, where length is irrelevant. The collective discussed whether it would make sense to publish a shadow on-line edition containing articles we received but didn’t include in the paper edition due to space considerations. The discussion felt funny. We don’t want radical print publications to be entirely replaced by the internet, but we don’t want to stick our heads in the sand and refuse to engage with other forums for distributing information. Let us know what you think. As an experiment, if you look at the on-line edition of this paper, you’ll see a few articles that we didn’t print.

We get lots of letters that we could have published, but many of them didn’t react to what we publish in very interesting ways. So we ended up cutting the letters section and publishing a page of obituaries, instead. The lives described in the obits are messages to all of us about how to find meaning through resistance and action.

We neglected to include an obituary of anarchist political prisoner, writer, painter, and jailhouse lawyer Harold H. Thompson who passed away, November 11th 2008, in the West Tennessee State Penitentiary. May he finally be free.

We also missed getting an article on the RNC8. An angry voicemail from a corporate newspaper organization claimed that someone had put a stack of Slingshot papers in their newspaper boxes somewhere in southern California. Of course they threw our papers away. If you’re a volunteer distributor, keep that in mind — Slingshots like to end up in places they won’t get thrown away.

Slingshot is always looking for new writers, artists, editors, photographers, translators, distributors & independent thinkers to make this paper. If you send in something written, please be open to being edited.

Editorial decisions are made by the Slingshot collective, but not all the articles reflect the opinions of all collective members. We welcome debate and constructive criticism. Please stop peeing in the drinking water.

Thanks to all who made this: Asphalt, Cometbus, Compost, Crystal, Daisy, Dominique, Eggplant, Ginger, Glenn, Gregg, Gerald, Hunter, Julia, Justin, Kate, Kathryn, Kermit, Kerry, Lesley, Melissa, Memoria Collectiva, PB, Samantha, Stephanie, Will, Xarique and all the authors and artists.

Slingshot New Volunteer Meeting

Volunteers interested in getting involved with Slingshot can come to the new volunteer meeting on Sunday, March 8, 2009 at 4 p.m. at the Long Haul in Berkeley (see below.)

Article Deadline and Next Issue Date

Submit your articles for issue 100 (!) by April 11 2009 at 3 p.m.

Volume 1, Number 99, Circulation 20,000

Printed January 30, 2009

Slingshot Collective

Sponsored by Long Haul

3124 Shattuck Avenue. Berkeley, CA 94705

Phone: (510) 540-0751

slingshot@tao.ca • www.slingshot.tao.ca

Circulation Information

Subscriptions to Slingshot are free to prisoners, low income and anyone in the USA with a Slingshot Organizer, or $1 per issue or for back issues. Outside the Bay Area, we’ll mail a free stack of copies of Slingshot to you if you give them out free.

The deepening economic recession is beginning to cause a lot of stress and insecurity for people who are losing jobs, facing piles of bills they can’t pay, and dealing with losing houses and other material things they spent years working to obtain. Even for those of us who are still working and still have enough money to get by, there is a sense of uncertainty — will it all come crashing down next month?

If you’re critical of the system, you have to be suspicious of the level of hype and the narrowing of the discourse surrounding the recession, even while you feel concern for people at the short end of the economic stick. The fact that the recession is causing such mass suffering reveals the failures of the capitalist system — its mal-distribution of resources, its inequality, and its focus on production and growth divorced from human needs or happiness. Mainstream politicians want to “fix” capitalism so we can return to a state of steady economic growth. But capitalism is broken when it is growing — we don’t want to return to business as usual. How can we use this period of economic collapse to move farther away from capitalism, rather than allowing its problems to hijack our lives?

Perhaps there are ways in which the recession can be a creative time for the human energy that would have gone into the fast-moving economic machine to go in different directions: to the community rather than selfishness, to social change rather than the status quo, to living outside the system now rather than trying to live up to its pre-set goals of property accumulation, status and the future.

The recession can help us see the absurdity of the capitalist system that is better hidden when business is booming. It can provide time to wonder whether our lives during the good times were really making us happy, or whether all that frantic activity was ultimately meaningless. If so, what would a more meaningful existence look like? Can we build alternative economic structures that last beyond the recession and build opportunities for cooperation outside of the capitalist machine?

The Invisible Hand

Recessions are not really malfunctions of the capitalist system — they are a fundamental part of it. The history of capitalism features an inevitable business cycle of boom and bust. Pro-capitalists who hope to perfect capitalism so it can exist without recessions don’t understand the way their economic system works. Conversely, radicals who predict the demise of capitalism each time the stock market falls aren’t studying history carefully enough, either. This recession — like all the other recessions and depressions before it — will not on its own spell the end of capitalism. That doesn’t mean that recessions can’t be used by radicals against capitalism — just that we can’t fool ourselves into thinking capitalism will end itself. It needs our help.

It is instructive to see the politicians and business owners — from Bush to Obama and from China to Russia to Germany to the USA — united in their powerlessness over the economic system itself. The recession makes it clear that people don’t control the economy — the economy controls people. Just as the economy controls what you can do for work, what you can buy, and how you live, the system controls the actions of the politicians and the business managers who supposedly are in charge.

This is precisely backwards from how an economic system should be. A reasonable system would serve people — giving them the things that they need, responding to their collective decisions, and balancing human interests and environmental concerns. Capitalism, to the contrary, by its very nature manipulates and constrains people — forcing humans to adjust to the system’s imperatives — while destroying the natural environment. Capitalism silences the self-determination of the population, while selecting a lucky few to hold somewhat more power to act within its artificial constraints.

Recessions are moments when the system’s intense productive energies turn in on itself — economic activity and growth fall off precisely because economic activity and growth have produced too much stuff to be purchased and consumed by those who have money. Note that the capitalist system can run out of consumers even while many people don’t have enough — capitalism only serves those with money, not necessarily those in need. As purchases fall below production, economic activity contracts, throwing people out of work, who then themselves must cut consumption because they no longer have money, leading to a downward spiral of decreasing consumption and production.

Capitalism’s own perverse logic requires economic inequality and scarcity of resources for huge numbers of people. Competition acts to depress wages for workers — with a desperate unemployed “reserve army of labor” totally without work and therefore without money to get what they need. And yet the system simultaneously needs to find consumers with money to purchase the goods it creates. The system ping-pongs back and forth between temporarily solving the problem by bringing new consumers, resources and methods on-line, only to hit a crisis point as its internal logic plays itself out.

This painful oscillation between boom and bust, competition and income stratification nonetheless overall produces limitless economic growth, i.e. greater and greater human transformation of natural resources into processed forms for use by human beings. This is determined by the internal logic of the system — each individual or company must expand production, efficiency and wealth or lose out to another individual or company which is better at playing the game.

The most crucial flaw in capitalism is not the boom and bust cycle, but its limitless growth, because capitalism exists on a planet with finite resources. While this problem hasn’t been very noticeable until recently, it is likely to eclipse the pain of income stratification and the boom and bust cycle as the key reason why capitalism cannot continue on its present course. Environmental crises like global warming, over-fishing of the oceans, deforestation, soil depletion and loss of species are not really scientific or technological failures. They are the new face of economic crisis in which the economy destroys the earth faster than it can regenerate itself.

Discrediting the rat race

Because the recession makes visible the ways in which the market economy doesn’t serve people’s needs, it can be a good time to nurture opposition to the capitalist system on a political and philosophical level. In good times, the economy is less visible — people get so busy buying and selling that they don’t have much energy left for critique. When the economy goes wrong, people have extra time to question why things are the way they are.

Radicals can seek to move the discussion beyond shallow media hyped fear about job loss, bank collapse and stock market decline and the need to get “back to normal.” We can question whether all this industrial production and consumption — which causes so much ecological damage — is really making us happy in the first place. A lot of what people are expected to consume — fast food, the newest gizmo, suburban homes — is superficial junk. A lot of the economy’s energy is used to market consumption for its own sake.

When times are “good” people are on a treadmill — seeking the next new thing. But when they get there, they feel empty until they start grabbing for something else. It is all about the pursuit, and not the enjoyment, awareness or appreciation of the destination. There is no now, only desire for some future experience that will trigger satisfaction. But to keep the cycle moving and the economy growing, you never actually get there. As the economy gets more efficient and productive, we’ve seen a speedup in the process — people develop a short attention span and seek more consumer stimuli every day.

Recessions ca
n help break the cycle and provide a path off the psychic treadmill. Right now, millions of people are re-thinking their consumption and trying to adjust to living with less. While the mainstream sees this as unfortunate and painful, there are other ways to understanding living with less. If all the stuff and speed of the boom times left us feeling unfulfilled, was it really worth all the overtime, deforestation, carbon emissions and sweatshops? Or could there be another way?

Getting off the grid

Cooperation, sharing, and doing stuff ourselves are the opposite of competition, each for themselves, and depending on an industrial economy for all our material needs. During recessions, the system offers forms of assistance designed to disempower people and make them more dependent on the system — welfare, unemployment insurance, charity.

What if people organized to build alternative economic structures to help us get through the recession, and off the system for good even after the recession is over with? This could mean cooperating to help each other rather than buying and selling services, re-learning how to make our own goods and grow some of our own food, and realizing that a lot of the stuff we have been consuming is not really all that important to our happiness in the first place. When you’re involved in creating what you use, the idea of consuming for its own sake no longer makes sense. The system is all about marketing and creating new needs — when you step off the system, you reclaim your internal sense of what you want and really need. Of course ultimately you can’t really reclaim your life without getting rid of capitalism once and for all.

In the end, the boom and bust economic cycle distracts from more fundamental questions. The real issue is not whether stocks are up or down. Perhaps we don’t want the economy to bounce back to frantic levels of growth — tearing up the earth in pursuit of more stuff, more technology, more hours spent at a job, less opportunities to do stuff for ourselves — and less satisfaction and space to engage with our lives. Since the capitalist economy doesn’t really supply many people’s needs even in the good times, maybe we need to find ways to meet human needs other than the very limited form of economic growth embodied by capitalism. When everyone is furiously building sterile condos and making pre-packaged “home cooked meals” in a plastic bag, we’re creating a lonely and sad world. We seek human satisfaction and ecological balance with a healthy planet, not gross domestic product. When we are faced with living with less, we may find that we can regain our inter-connection with others, with the planet and with ourselves.