Author: Slingshot Collective

By PB Floyd

I’ve been fascinated by solar energy as a futuristic technology since I was 7 years old. Solar energy is locally produced, makes people independent from huge centralized oil and power companies and avoids burning fossil fuels. When I started a group house in 1998, I looked into putting solar power on the house right away because I hated the idea of our house contributing to the pollution and corporate domination that we are trying to stop. Unfortunately, at the time, it wasn’t financially realistic. This spring, I finally had time and money to install a professional quality solar hot water system on the house. But putting in the long-desired solar system didn’t turn out how I expected it to.

Do It Yourself (DIY)

Over the past 10 or 12 years, I’ve become increasingly personally worried on a day-to-day, psychological level about climate change caused by burning fossil fuels. At this point, I talk about it in therapy. As a result, I’ve tried to reduce my personal consumption of fossil fuels in various ways — biking not driving, using a clothes line not the drier, bundling up in the winter instead of using a heater, and keeping lights off when no one is in a room, etc.

Five years ago, I decided that I could use a camping solar shower to heat my shower water during the summer. You’ve seen these things: they’re a plastic bag that is black on one side with a nozzle on one end. You fill them with water, set them in the sun, they get hot, and then you hang them from a tree and take a shower from the nozzle. I started using one at home — heating it on the front porch and hanging it in my bathroom’s shower stall.

I quickly fell in love with it. It got me in touch with the natural rhythm of the sun. When it was cloudy, I wouldn’t shower. I originally intended to use it just during the summer, but I ended up using it all year long for the last 5 or so years. I became fanatical about it, absolutely refusing to take a fossil fueled shower. If it was cloudy for more time than I could tolerate not bathing, I would take a cold shower. After a couple of years, I got tired of the flimsy, expensive camping solar showers so I designed and built a permanent one out of ABS plumbing pipe for about $25. (See the design in Slingshot issue #80.)

My personal solar shower was simple, cheap and cut fossil fuel use, but it had a fatal flaw: I couldn’t convince anyone other than me to use it — or rather it wasn’t practical for other people. The main problem is that five gallons of water — about a 5 minute shower — weighs 45 pounds and is quite bulky. Once the water gets hot in the sun, you have to lift the heavy water over your head to hang it on hooks in the shower stall. My housemates said they weren’t strong enough to lift it and carry it up two flights of stairs. Also, the DIY shower is only hot when the sun shines so you have to time your day around the shower to some extent and you can never shower in the morning, only the afternoon or early evening. (In the winter it will be hot on a sunny day at 3 p.m. – in the summer it can be hot anytime between 1 – 6 p.m., and it can easily get too hot to use if you don’t watch it.) These restrictive hours are okay for me now since I work at home, but before this gig I worked 9-5 and I had to shower before going to work.

Despite the problems with my DIY solar shower, it did prove that solar power is a fantastic way to heat water for home use. On a psychological level, this started eating away at me. Someone would take a fossil fueled shower on a hot sunny day and I just knew that those CO2 emissions were unnecessary. I learned that in some areas (Israel for example) all domestic hot water was solar heated.

When we started the house, I got a bid for installing solar hot water: $12,000. That was too much money when you consider that our annual bill for natural gas (used for cooking and heating water) is only about $400 a year. So the key to installing solar now, in 2007, would be to do the labor myself to save money.

Basic solar hot water heating

Heating water with solar energy is fairly simple. You install panels on your roof, pass cold water through them, and then store the resulting hot water in an insulated tank so that when you need hot water when the sun isn’t shinning, you’ll have it. In the panels, water pipes are connected to metal fins that are painted black. The black metal absorbs the light and gets very hot and transfers the heat to the tubes of water. The panels have insulation on the bottom and glass on the top to keep the heat in.

The kind of system I just installed is called an open loop system. (If you aren’t interested in technical details, skip down 2 paragraphs.) That means that cold water from the city water supply flows into the storage tank and directly up into the solar panels on the roof. The system has a differential controller which means that when a thermometer in the solar panel detects a temperature that is 16 degrees F higher than the temperature detected by another thermometer in the storage tank, a circulating pump turns on to move water from the storage tank up through the panels. The differential controller and the pump work on grid power, but they only consume about 15 watts of electricity when the pump is running or about half a watt when the controller is on. So for all practical purposes, running the system doesn’t consume fossil fuels.

There is a fossil fueled hot water back up for periods when there is no sun. After water leaves the storage tank, it passes through a standard gas hot water heater that will heat the water unless it is already hot going in. To prevent the solar hot water (which can reach temperatures of 200 degrees) from burning people, there is a mixing valve to mix cold water in whenever the solar hot water exceeds 130 degrees.

While the basic design of the system is simple, actually manufacturing and installing such a system is not such an easy matter. First, even though I did all of the work to install the system myself (and thus for free) the components I had to buy for the system were damn expensive. The 120 gallon storage tank, three 4X8 foot solar panels, circulating pump, differential controller, valves, plus 150 feet of cooper pipe and fittings and insulation cost about $8,000. That $8,000 actually represents . . . burning fossil fuels. Ironically, in my attempt to avoid burning fossil fuels, I had just purchased huge amounts of copper, aluminum, glass, plastic foam insulation — even some high tech microchips to run the differential controller. These are all items I generally try to avoid. The environmental damage associated with mining and smelting copper and aluminum and glass and making foam insulation are striking — what was I doing?!?

And then there was installing it. It took me pretty much every waking moment for 2 weeks. Our roof is at a 45 degree angle so a nice guy who is working on our local tree-sit trained me on using ropes and harnesses so I wouldn’t fall and kill myself. The three 4X8 foot solar panels each weighed 125 pounds and they had to be lifted up 35 feet to the top of our 45 degree angled roof! I lost a number of nights of sleep thinking “how can it be done?” It took 4 of us and a lot of creativity, but we got those panels up there. Once the panels were on the roof, the work had only in a sense started. I had to install pipe from the storage tank up to the panels and back, install the pump, valves, etc. Because I’m not the greatest plumber, after I was all done there were some leaks. I would fill the system to test it, find a leak, have to drain the system, go up on the roof to fix the leak, and repeat. (It finally worked!)

The fallacy of Solar energy

At some point during this extremely difficult and sometimes dangerous process, I was sitting on the top of the roof and I realized that I had made a mistake:

I had spent $8,000, used a lot of environmentally d
amaging resources and a bunch of time and energy to accomplish what I had been doing simply, cheaply, locally and easily with my $25 DIY solar shower for the last 5 years.

I had fallen into a very classic human mental trap. In the US, we grow up with hot water flowing out of the tap — and we don’t have to think about how that happens. We don’t have to see the gas fields or all of the environmental destruction that makes that possible. So we think that hot tap water is in some way “normal” and “natural” and we get stubborn and feel entitled to that convenience. When our society runs up against the reality that the ways we’ve been living are not sustainable — that having all this convenience was never normal but instead was always the exception to how people have lived and evolved over the ages — and that this convenience has been bought by burning fossil fuels, oppressing people and destroying the environment — it is hard to give up the conveniences we’ve grown up with and change.

So to avoid change — to avoid having to admit that the way we’ve been living is out of balance with the earth — human beings think of all kinds of fancy ways to achieve the end result of having things operate “the way we’ve been living” by using a different technology. But this is like a cat chasing its tail. Just because you’re not directly burning fossil fuels everyday to heat your water doesn’t mean you’ve stepped outside of our society’s earth killing machine. High technology has extreme environmental costs. And most “alternative green” technologies currently being promoted are high technology. Hybrid cars, ethanol and biodiesel — these are very centralized, high tech solutions designed to permit continuation of an unsustainable, car based existence. Living local and riding a bike or walking is how you reduce your impact — switching one type of high tech for another just trades one problem for another.

In the end, we need to look beyond how a particular technology is powered and instead recognize that global warming is caused not just by the wrong fuel, but by the wrong type of thinking — lifestyles that are too convenient, too speedy, too dependent on technology.

Taking a bath

So now that I’ve put in the solar hot water system, I still think it is a good thing within the context of the very unsustainable society within which we live. There is a cool little read-out that shows how hot the water in the storage tank is, and I feel good when it is 160 degrees — that means the morning showers the next day are covered. But I’m going to keep using my $25 low tech solar shower even though it is a little more work and sometimes I don’t get a shower when it rains. I’m still looking for a better balance between DIY solar and high tech solar. After all, I’m a fanatic.

Ocean acidification is another catastrophic form of environmental damage that is resulting from the continued burning of fossil fuels — one that is only now being understood by scientists. Since the industrial revolution, people have added two hundred and fifty billion tons of carbon to the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels. This has changed the concentration of carbon dioxide in the air. The air now contains 380 parts per million CO2, which is 40 percent higher than prior to the industrial revolution. This change in the chemistry of the atmosphere causes the greenhouse effect.

Scientists have recently understood that the increased concentration of CO2 in the air is also changing the pH of the oceans. About half of the total carbon dumped into the air by humans in the last 150 years has been absorbed by the oceans. If not for oceans acting as a “carbon sink” the concentration of CO2 in the air would be as high as 500 parts per million, not the current 380 ppm. Because 70 percent of the earth is covered with water, up to 90 percent of the CO2 humans pour into the atmosphere will eventually be absorbed by the oceans.

When CO2 dissolves into water, it forms carbonic acid (H2CO3). This process has already changed the pH of the water near the surface of the oceans by .1. Seawater is naturally alkaline, with a pH ranging from 7.8 to 8.5. (A pH of 7 is neutral, neither acid nor basic.)

Changing the pH of the oceans risks causing a collapse of life in the oceans, since a wide variety of ocean life is sensitive to the pH of ocean water. Many ocean creatures — from clams to coral reefs — build their shells out of calcium carbonate — CaCO3. The oceans contain massive amounts of calcium carbonate dissolved in the water. When the pH of the ocean goes down, it reduces the supply of CaCO3 dissolved in the water (the saturation rate), and makes it harder for animals to build shells. If the CaCO3 supply in the water gets too low, existing shelled creatures and reefs actually begin to dissolve. Scientists forecast that if carbon continues to be released by humans at the current rates, CO2 in the air could reach 650 parts per million by 2075, which would reduce the supply of CaCO3 in the ocean so much that all shelled creatures would dissolve. Since the ocean food chain is largely dependent on creatures built out of CaCO3, the disappearance of these animals could lead to a collapse of life in the oceans.

There is historical precedence for what humans are currently doing to the climate. About 50 million years ago, for reasons that are not currently understood, huge amounts or carbon was released into the atmosphere. This event is called the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM). As a result of the extra carbon, temperatures rose dramatically and there were mass extinctions of animals. In the oceans, many shelled animals also went extinct because the pH of the oceans changed and dissolved shelled creatures. The ocean floor is normally covered with the shells of dead, shelled animals. At the time of PETM, however, no shells are found — core samples during this time are a band of clay between thick layers of CaCO3. Scientists believe the PETM took place over one thousand to ten thousand years — by contrast, carbon is now being released by humans as much as thirty times faster than during PETM.

The key to avoiding this future is a zero emissions future. Any carbon humans release into the air by burning fossil fuels goes somewhere. There is now wide understanding that CO2 in the air causes problems with the climate. But most of the carbon will eventually end up in the ocean — keep your mind on the coral reefs next time you turn on your space heater or put your clothes in the dryer. . .

With construction beginning in 2008, and evictions beginning this summer, folks in southern Indiana are stepping up resistance to Interstate 69. Long time residents, farmers, small landowners, and eco-activists all show up at the Indiana Dept. of Transportation’s public meetings to barrage them with complaints and insults. Office demos have continued, in Indiana and further along the route. A month long roadshow recently returned after speaking in cities on the route from Indiana to Texas about I-69 and road resistance. A lawsuit is in the courts over the contested Patoka National Wildlife refuge, where I-69 is planned to cut through. And this summer’s national Earth First! Round River Rendezvous will be in southern Indiana, with much of the trainings and discussions focused around resisting road construction.

Introduction to I-69

I-69 is a massive superhighway planned to facilitate increased trade between Canada, the United States, and Mexico. It is currently built from Ontario to Indianapolis, via the Port Huron border crossing in Michigan. National planners hope to see the highway extended through southwest Indiana, then into Kentucky, Tennessee, Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas, where it will connect with the highways of the Plan Puebla Panama (PPP) in Mexico.

Given that the existing I-69 crossing in Michigan handles about half of all NAFTA traffic between Canada and the U.S. and that the proposed crossing in Texas will handle over half of all Mexico-U.S. NAFTA traffic, its obvious that I-69 is an extremely important artery for globalized trade and for capital. This artery will be constructed at an enormous cost to the land community across the center of the U.S. The Trans Texas Corridor (the road-building project in Texas which encompasses I-69) will gobble up hundreds of thousands of acres. I-69 will destroy and disturb much of the remaining wilderness in southwestern Indiana and evict 400 rural families, not to mention the devastation caused in the other five states it will go through. Furthermore, I-69 is projected to handle more than nearly 12,000 new trucks every day through Indiana alone, meaning a vast increase in air pollution and the emission of greenhouse gases in our state.

The Fight Continues

The kind of destruction that I-69 promises to wreak means that is has been strongly opposed ever since it was first seriously put forward, at the same time NAFTA was being passed. Most of the states that it will affect are waiting to see if Indiana and Texas will even be able to start construction because of the many barriers that have been set up to construction, including ongoing community mobilizations, lawsuits, and a history of militant resistance.

In fact, a combination of these tactics won a major victory in Indiana on March 24, when Indiana’s governor, Mitch Daniels, announced a cancellation of two major roads connected to I-69. Just a few months prior, he had announced the construction of these two new toll roads, one of which would connect directly with I-69, and which would be sold off in the immediate future to a multinational corporation in order to fund the rest of I-69’s construction. However, in his press conference at the end of March, he was forced to admit that it was the overwhelming public opposition and growing resistance that forced him to withdraw these proposals. Now, although the state remains committed beginning I-69’s construction in 2008, it faces a growing financial crisis that might lead them to re-conceive I-69 itself as a private toll road, a move that would lead to even more resistance and anger across Indiana.

Expanding resistance

RBEF! is only one specific group within the wider anti-I-69 resistance community. A number of other organizations are continuing old initiatives or starting new ones as construction approaches. These range from the continued campaign of home and office demonstrations against those involved in planning to the filing of a new comprehensive lawsuit challenging the way that the environmental studies were rigged by INDOT.

Local Earth First!ers are contributing to the growing momentum in a number of ways. Besides continuing to be an antagonistic presence at INDOT-sponsored public meetings, RBEF! members are working with other local organizers to start a Listening Project, a concept borrowed from anti-Mountain Top Removal struggles. Earth First!ers are also organizing bike rides and camp-outs along the proposed route so that as many people as possible can get to know the bioregion that is being put at risk. Other recent projects have included restarting Bloomington’s Critical Mass bike ride to help highlight the connections between road-building, car-culture, and global warming; a new newsletter called the “Roadblock Report” to help co-ordinate different elements of the struggle and improve communication between the threatened communities; and speaking/performance tours across Indiana and the national I-69 route to help build resistance to the road.

There has also been an increase of activity against I-69 beyond Indiana. Farmers in Texas continue to organize, with some of them forming a Direct Action Network. Meanwhile, office demonstrations have spread up and down the route, with actions in Lexington against Wilbur Smith Associates, a global infrastructure planner that has also been involved in the PPP, and in Austin against Cintra, a Spanish multinational involved in dozens of highway construction and privatization schemes. We have also heard that an ongoing No I-69 graffiti campaign in Little Rock, AR has received attention from both the police and mainstream media.

We will never let them build this road

Over and over again media pundits in Indiana have claimed that I-69 cannot be stopped – and that as it gets closer to final approval it will become futile to fight against it. In their world view, ordinary people can only have a voice in the process by calmly submitting a comment to the bureaucrats at INDOT during the approved public comment period. Our struggle has proven them wrong again and again. Indiana’s governor was just forced to admit that popular resistance killed his plan to build separate toll roads to fund I-69. Momentum against the superhighway is growing at just the time INDOT officials were hoping people would learn to accept the “inevitable.” But how could it be any other way? We all know just how much is at stake: the future of our bioregion, the integrity of our communities, and the success or failure of one of their most important free trade infrastructure schemes. We will never let them build this road.

Roadblock Earth First! can be reached at roadblockef@yahoo.com. Contact us if you are interested in getting involved in the fight against I-69.

I-69 News is a new resource set up by an autonomous collective. Visit them at http://i69news.bee-town.com or submit content at i69news@riseup.net.

For info about the 2007 summer Earth First Round River Rendezvous, to be held in southern Indiana check http://earthfirst.bee-town.com or email efindiana@riseup.net

In Slingshot #93, I wrote about how my housemates and I harvested, processed and distributed hundreds of pounds of fossil fuel-free urban backyard fruit last summer. At the end of the article, I proposed that cities with nice growing conditions (like where I live in Berkeley) could grow a lot of our own fruit locally — eliminating the need to truck in fruit in fossil fueled trucks — if fruit trees could be planted on un-used urban spaces, such as the little strip between the street and the sidewalk known as the “parking strip.”

With this idea in mind, we agreed at a housemeeting this winter to plant 2 trees in the parking strip in front of our house — a plum tree and a persimmon tree. We don’t own this land — it is owned by the city. And we knew that there was a law against planting anything on this land — especially against planting a fruit tree. The city prohibits fruit trees because they are worried that people won’t pick the fruit and it will cause a mess.

When we moved into the house, this piece of the earth, about 45 feet long by about 5 feet wide, was covered by weeds, dead grass, and garbage. In other words, it was a mess — but apparently not as bad a mess as fruit trees would be. Since then, I’ve planted drought tolerant flowers on it each spring and it has been dead flower stalks the rest of the year. We try to clean up some of the garbage.

Planting the trees was the type of fantastic, hopeful act that planting a tree always is. When you plant a tree, you’re thinking far into the future, trusting and hoping that the future will hold a place for you, your friends and community, and the tree. You imagine the delicious fruit you may someday enjoy. It is a leap of faith.

I gently set the tree into the earth, watered it in, and began waiting the 2-5 years it would take to mature enough to produce a lot of food. It was an act of civil disobedience and a calculated risk that the city wouldn’t bust us for “nurturing an illegal fruit tree.” Since we’re anxious to pick the fruit, we weren’t worried that the tree would make a mess. In walking around town, I’ve noticed several dozen other “illegal” fruit trees on parking strips in the neighborhood — lemons, pears, oranges, apples, figs, olives, plums — so I thought that we would probably get away with it.

The Bust

Nope. Within just a couple of weeks, a truck from the city was out in front of our house and the city forester was knocking on the door. “These are fruiting trees. You have to remove them.” But she didn’t actually cut them down herself . . . we were supposed to do it.

Before the bust, every day on my way out of the house, I watched the bare trees looking for signs that it was spring — waiting for them to leaf out and begin to grow. And when the leaves came out, it was the kind of natural miracle that makes life amazing.

But after the bust, seeing the doomed trees growing everyday was sad.

Mass-produced agriculture and trucking food around is a major consumer of fossil fuels and a major contributor to global warming. As recently as 100 years ago in the USA– and still in many areas around the world — food is grown, picked and used all in the same place informally without money or markets by the people who are going to eat it.

While mainstream political leaders talk about “carbon offsets,” “alternative fuels” and other high-tech, corporate based “solutions” to reduce fossil fuel use, what is really needed is direct action — figuring out how to simply avoid fossil fuel use by living in ways that don’t require it.

So say you want to eat some fruit. The direct action way to do so is to plant a tree, take care of it, pick the fruit, share it with your friends and neighbors, and eat some of it yourself.

The mainstream/capitalist way to meet this need is for a corporation to own a vast tract of land somewhere out in the country and use fossil fueled machines and under-paid farm workers to plant and grow the fruit. In most cases, the fruit is grown with chemical fertilizers and pesticides, but even organically grown fruit generally uses various non-local inputs for fuel as well as hired labor. When the fruit is ready, the best ones are picked, boxed and put on trucks. All the fruit that has defects is usually thrown away. The boxes are driven on a truck to a warehouse where they are bought and sold by some more corporations. Even if you get your food from a farmer’s market, the food reaches you by truck. Finally, you work a job doing what someone else feels is important to get money to buy the fruit. And after work, you go to a market and buy the fruit.

The capitalist/mainstream way of dealing with the fossil fuels consumed in this process is first to have years of reports and meetings to discuss how it would be nice to not use so much fossil fuel. Slingshot first published articles about global warming in 1995 — there was enough evidence then to know it was real. At that point, Al Gore was vice-president with a real opportunity to do something about the problem, but I guess he was waiting for something . . . .

Since 1995, the amount of fossil fuels burned on earth each year has only increased, year after year.

The capitalist/mainstream meetings and reports on controlling climate change suggest solutions like carbon offsets or cap and trade systems which create a global stock market in carbon credits. These are very complex, market based, non-local strategies that often don’t actually prevent fossil fuels from being burned, but rather figure out ways to justify continuing to burn fossil fuels as usual. For instance, carbon offsets mean that the farmer (or liberal driving an SUV) purchases the right to burn fossil fuels from a company that would take the money and spend it — probably not to reduce the burning of fossil fuels — but on projects to reduce other human emissions of greenhouse gases. For instance, to cap garbage dumps with a cover so as to collect methane gas (another potent greenhouse gas) so that it doesn’t escape into the atmosphere. Granted, capping garbage dumps is a great idea — but shouldn’t the garbage dump company pay for that?

Carbon offsets are ideas invented by politicians and businessmen to sound like something is being done about global warming but they generally mean that fossil fuels continue to be burned — business as usual — by people who can afford it. They are a fake solution.

By contrast, growing our own food on the streets where we live is a real solution — every piece of fruit we eat that doesn’t have to travel by truck thus reduces demand for trucks and the burning of fossil fuels to run them. Such solutions empower individuals and local communities rather than corporations and governments. Such solutions emphasize simplicity and working with the earth, rather than hyper-complex, high-tech new structures designed to clean up the mess made by the current hyper-complex, high-tech structures.

Epilogue

As of this writing, our illegal fruit trees are still there. The city told us to take them out, but they didn’t follow up and we won’t do their dirty work. The city may come and take them at any time, but we’re hoping that they’ll forget about them — after all, the dozens of other “illegal” trees in our neighborhood are still there. Now whenever I walk around town, I spot more and more “illegal” trees quietly defying the Law. I also planted an illegal Fuji apple tree in front of a nearby abandoned house as an experiment to see if it would be possible to plant stealth parking strip trees in various forgotten urban spots. The apple tree has so far gone un-noticed. When you think of direct action, you often think of a logging road blockade, a treesit or a masked figure disabling construction equipment in the middle of the night. In corporate America, even growing food outside the market system requires a mask.

Domesticated rats make great pets. A day is enough to earn the loyalty and affection of a rat. They bond very quickly with a friendly human. They are trainable and can learn to respond to their name. Rats, unlike most other rodent pets, are gentle and friendly when being held by people they know. However, if someone they do not know startles them, rats will bite out of fear. When new people come over, the rats in my house take an interest. They seem to find our natural habits as entertaining as we find theirs.

Despite this, people have always been scared when wild rats take up residence in human dwellings. Here’s some tips for dealing humanely and respectfully with rat infestations in your home.

The best way to handle a rat infestation is to prevent access to the inside of your building. It is a mistake to try to close up every hole in the outside of your building, since the idea is not to trap the rats in the walls. You want to focus on the inside of the building. Move all your furniture away from the exterior walls and look for holes near the floor. Cover any holes you see, even small holes, with 1/8 inch or 1/4 inch wire mesh. Wood is okay if you have to use it, but remember that rats enjoy chewing on wood. Then, look at your ceilings, especially closets. Close up any access from the roof.

Clean the entire kitchen of any debris especially behind the stove and refrigerator, which are places where rats like to nest. When you look for holes in the kitchen, try not to worry about the interior walls between the rooms of the building. Again, your objective is to avoid trapping the rats in the walls to starve.

Normally rats have a territory where they move around, hugging the walls, looking for holes to enter and search out food sources. Once they go over the same route a couple of times, that path gets saturated with their scent and becomes a “rat run.” Different rats follow these rat runs in their busy search for food and shelter.

Another important step to take is clearing away any vegetation or debris that has accumulated against the outside of the building. If rats have to be out in the open to inspect your building, they are more likely to give up and move on.

People for Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) suggests the following on their website : “If the rats are in a place that cannot be ‘rodent-proofed,’ such as a car engine, you can prepare a deterrent. Rats and other small animals cannot tolerate the scent or taste of pepper. Make a mixture of salad oil, horseradish, garlic, and plenty of cayenne pepper. Let this mixture sit for four days, strain it into a spray bottle, and spray it under the car’s hood. This is completely safe for engine interiors, and it won’t harm curious animals. Mothballs and peppermint oil-soaked cotton balls are also great rodent repellents and can be tucked into an engine to prevent rodents from chewing on electrical wires.”

There’s one house I’ve been to where wild rats try to come in when the front door is open. I can’t think of any perfect way to stop the rats entering through an open door. However, keeping the floor and the ground outside the door cleaned of rat scent (which just attracts more rats), and then spraying the salad dressing on the door step may deter the little guys. This strategy, if successful, would wear off quickly so repeating frequently would be important.

I’ve seen rats get inadvertently trapped in apartments after the holes are all closed. Then, it is necessary to trap them. I noticed that a garbage can, emptied except for a little water, when pushed up against the kitchen counter would succeed in trapping a rat looking around for leftovers. To make it more irresistible to rats, try putting some peanut butter or oatmeal at the bottom of the can, to make it fragrant.

The trapped rats will be panicked and noisy but it may actually be less harmful to their psyche than the humane traps sold at hardware stores. If this works for you and you catch a rat, you’ll get to see first hand how high a rat can jump from a stationary position. It really is amazing. PETA’s website suggests a 50-gallon drum and building a ramp out of bricks or other stuff from the ground up to the edge of the drum. Never try to handle a caught rat unless you are wearing really thick protective clothing.

When relocating a rat, chose a place where there is no rat control program in place. Here in Berkeley, the Marina would likely be a good place since there is a good number of small animals there. Food is plentiful all year round. If you can’t think of a safe outdoor place to release your new little buddy, drop him/her off at your local humane society or SPCA. Only use these organizations as a last resort, since many probably have no way to relocate the little creatures.

Glue traps can be a hassle for even the most heartless human. An acquaintance of mine once complained of the noise a rat made when caught in a glue trap. She described the animal squeaking and crying loudly for two consecutive nights, disturbing her sleep. I asked her “did your sleep improve after the rat starved?”

Nine people charged in federal court in Eugene, Oregon with involvement in a number of Earth Liberation Front-claimed arsons against eco-destroying targets — victims of Operation Backfire and the so-called greenscare — will be sentenced to prison terms in May and June after all accepted plea bargain deals. Daniel McGowan, Jonathan Paul, Joyanna Zacher, and Nathan Block bravely held out for plea deals under which they do not have to cooperate with the government investigation and won’t have to snitch on any fellow activists in exchange for their plea deals. These four agreed to prison terms of up to 8 years.

Despite the fact than none of the defendants in the case were ever charged with the crime of terrorism, federal prosecutors are also seeking terrorism enhancements of up to an additional 20 years in prison against the defendants. No human being was injured in any of the ALF/ELF arsons and labeling these acts as “terrorism” shows the government’s willingness to use fear generated by 9-11 against domestic political radicals. While the government argues that the nine are “terrorists,” the snitch who turned all of them in — Jacob Fergeson — walks free even though he took credit for setting over 15 arsons in a span of 10 years begging the question, “why, If the defendants are indicted and convicted and have to fight the terrorism enhancement, does Jacob get a free ride and a pat on the back?”

The defendants need support to get as lenient sentences as possible. As Slingshot goes to press, the sentencing dates are: May 15: Oral arguments to determine if the Terrorism Enhancement can apply to any of the defendants — the Court could throw it out completely or consider it in each individual hearing later; May 22: Cooperating Defendant/witness (CW) Stanislas Meyerhoff’s sentencing hearing; May 24: CW Kevin Tubbs; May 25: CW Chelsea Gerlach; May 29: CW Darren Thurston; May 31: CW Suzanne Savoie; May 31: CW Kendall Tankersley (1 pm); June 1: Joyanna Zacher and Nathan Block; June 4: Daniel McGowan; June 5: Jonathan Paul. All hearings are in Eugene; Oregon at 9 am except where indicated.

Support Information

Joyanna Zacher, and Nathan Block have remained in jail since their arrest and need support. You can write to them at the address below or contact their support committee:

supportersofnathanandjoyanna@gmail.com.

• Nathan Block #1663667, Lane County Jail, 101 W 5th Ave, Eugene, OR 97401

• Joyanna Zacher #1662550, Lane County Jail, 101 W 5th Ave, Eugene, OR 97401

Daniel and Jonathan are out on bail. Direct support to them at: www.supportdaniel.org, Family and Friends of Daniel McGowan, POB 106, NY, NY 10156, friendsofdanielmcg@ yahoo.com, Friends of Jonathan Paul, PMB 267, 2305 Ashland Street, Ste. C, Ashland, OR 97520, friendsofjonathanpaul@yahoo.com.

For more information about the greenscare, check out cldc.org, greenscare.org or portland.indymedia.org.

Briana Waters on trial

Briana Waters is now facing a September 17 trial in Washington for alleged involvement with an arson attack on the University of Washington Center for Urban Horticulture in 2001 that was claimed by the Earth Liberation Front. She faces a mandatory minimum sentence of 35 years in prison if convicted. A number of the defendants who agreed to cooperate with the government in the Eugene, Oregon greenscare cases (see related article, this page) are expected to testify against her. Briana — a mom and violin teacher — maintains her innocence and needs powerful support from the environmental community.

Briana needs help raising funds for her September 17, 2007 trial as well as statements of support from those who know her. She is free on bail. Contact supportbriana.org for more information. Think about having a benefit for her case and mail checks to: Briana Waters Legal Defense Fund c/o Eric Waters, P.O. Box 1689 Old Chelsea Station, New York, NY 10113.

Published by AK Press (2006) $18.95

This book came out in Spanish a few years ago and now, an English translation let me read this for the first time. It’s no disappointment! Horizontalism is about the social movements in Argentina since the economic collapse of December 2001 — a part of the bigger movements for social justice sweeping across Latin America. What I really liked about this book is that it’s from the point of view of people participating in the movement. The movement is really different from a lot of others — from the ground-up and not imposed by elites or cadres. The 2001 economic collapse was an event that created a grassroots, mass uprising.

The book is divided into sections and based on interviews providing different perspectives on different subjects. One section deals with how people thought the country changed in December 2001 when hundreds of neighborhood assemblies suddenly appeared throughout the country. In a country where 30,000 people disappeared in the 1980s during the military dictatorship, all of a sudden no one, even the middle class, could get their money. Thousands of people in Buenos Aires took to the streets and banged pots into the night. From there, people began gathering in their neighborhoods to try to run their own lives outside of the failed money economy. They took over factories and other workplaces where the management had either fled or owed the workers large amounts of money and occupied unused buildings. This direct action flew in the face of the clientilism of Argentina.

The famous roadblocks of the landless MST movement in Brazil, where people blocked off roads across the country to shut down commerce, swept across Argentina. The popular slogan was “Oh, que se vayan todos!” (“They all must go!”, referring to the nation’s “democratically” elected politicians.) A sudden burst of anger brought down five Presidents in a matter of two weeks.

The process of “horizontalidad” became the main philosophy of the uprising. In the assemblies and collectives, people worked together for their common well being, equal in power at least in structure, often with consensus instead of voting. Several people interviewed in the book commented that while having a boss or simply voting for decision making might be easier, you disempower people when you go the easy route. There are several great lines about how the walk is just as important as the talk, and how bullshit speeches and posturing don’t take a group of people very far.

In an interview in the book, an interviewee described horizontalism: “There isn’t one right way; there isn’t anyone that has the truth and tells us what we have to do. It means seeing each other as equals, or trying to see each other as equals. It also means — and this is something that’s a challenge for the assemblies — learning to listen to one another. The assembly is like a game, it’s really interesting. Someone comes up with an idea and the idea is elaborated upon by someone else, then someone else expands or changes it, and then as you listen, another person improves the idea, or says something totally different. The initial person might say ‘no’ or agree, and this is how we move forward. It’s like the game where a group makes up a story together. One person says ‘the house’ and the next says ‘the house is’ and the next ‘the house is in’ and then ‘the house is in the mountains.’ If someone is in the assembly not listening, but talking, and trying to move forward with something else… Or if that person just makes statements or speeches, which sometimes happens, things really don’t go anywhere.”

Another section is on autogestion, or workers’ self-management, focusing on how the explosions of December 19th and 20th gave worker activists — who had been fighting management for years on issues like safety, back-wages, and dignity on the job — a chance to demonstrate a different way of doing things. Workers who were owed tons of money kept factories, clinics, bakeries and distribution centers open, but kept the profits for themselves instead of giving it over to the boss. Nearly 200 companies were taken over in this fashion. Though they still operated under “the market,” the fact that they got rid of their bosses was a very important step. Many actually moved into the factories because “they didn’t have enough money to get home” and were sick and tired of walking all their lives. Some decided to make the workplaces into service centers for their neighborhoods instead of for the rich. Many of these efforts have been shut down since by the government and repression, but there are also many still operating today.

Another chapter deals with women. Before the uprising, machismo was very widespread in Argentina. Several people in the book note that amongst the first people organizing neighborhood assemblies and setting up road blockades were women who had traditionally taken care of the children. When men got involved, they talked more than anyone else. Many women’s collectives and groups started during this time as people realized it was okay to speak out against old forms of repression.

There’s a good chapter on repression by the state and it’s allies as well — I don’t want to give the impression that everything is lala-happy in Argentina or that revolutionary work has been completed. There were several instances of police killing people at the roadblocks, assassinations, and violent evictions of occupied spaces.

This is really a beautiful book. I give Sitrin a lot of credit for letting people speak for themselves. It’s very hard to say what will happen in Argentina in the next few years, or in Latin America, or the world for that matter, but I’m really glad I got a chance to read the experiences of these people in Argentina striving to create a world without oppression or hierarchy. They’re trying to build a world where everyone has the power to decide what is best for their community. The question is, how can we defend this new world from its enemies like the state or defenders of the old ways?

James Generic is a member of the Wooden Shoe Book collective, Philadelphia, PA.

May

May 19 • 11 – 6 pm

8th Annual Montreal Anarchist Bookfair Montreal, Quebec 514 859-9090, www.anarchistbookfair.ca

May 31 – June 3

Pedagogy and Theatre of the Oppressed Conference Minneaoplis MN www.mwsocialforum.org

June

June 1-7

The 9th Annual Wild Earth Gathering, Coastal, BC wildearth.resist.ca/, wildearth@resist.ca

June 6-8

Protest G8 meeting in Heiligendamm, Germany. dissentnetwork.org

June 9 – 10

Sexy Spring – Minneapolis, MN Sexyspring.org

June 13-15

1st (inter)National Copwatch Conference in Berkeley,CA cwconference2007@lists.riseup.net (see page 12)

June 14-15

Resist the Atlantica free trade summit — a proposed free trade agreement. Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. www.stopatlantica.org resistatlantica2007@gmail.com

June 21-23

Free Minds Free People – A national conference on education for liberation. Chicago, IL edliberation.org

June 22 • 3 pm

Transgender March – San Francisco – Dolores Park transmarch.org

June 23 • 3 pm

Dyke March – San Francisco – Dolores Park – March @ 7 dykemarch.org

June 24

San Francisco Gay/Lesbian/Bi-sexual/Trans Pride march – sfpride.org

June 27 – July 1

US Social Forum – Atlanta, GA. www.ussf2007.org

lum-pen-pro-le-tar-i-at n. the lowest level of the proletariat comprising unskilled workers, vagrants, and criminals and characterized by a lack of class-consciousness.

July

July 2 – 8

Earth First! Round River rendezvous – Southern Indiana – http://earthfirst.bee-town.com

July 8 – 10

International Anarchist Conference Mexico City, Mexico email biblioteca@libertad.org.mx

July 13 – 15

Think GalactiCon – Radical Sci-Fi Convention Chicago, IL – Roosevelt University – thinkgalactica.org

July 21-31

EZLN Intergalactic Encuentro – Mexico www.zeztainternazional.org/esp

July 31

Deadline to submit art, historical dates, radical contact info for 2008 Slingshot Organizer – 3124 Shattuck Berkeley

August

August 19 • 4 pm

Slingshot new volunteer meeting – get involved in this rag – 3124 Shattuck Ave. Berkeley

August 31 – Sept. 2

RNC 2008 Welcoming Committee pre-convention planning skillshare — get to know Minneapolis/St. Paul — Critical Mass, tours, workshops, street medic training. www.rncwelcomingcommittee.org

August • date / location TBA

Feral Visions Against Civilization – greenanarchy.org

September

September 7

Protest the APEC summit meeting in Sydney, Australia. www.stopwarcoalition.org

September 14-16

Protest the fall meeting of the IMF/World Bank – films, rallies and discussions. www.50years.org

September 15 • 3 pm

Article and art submissions due for Slingshot issue #95 at the Long Haul in Berkeley.

And so on…

February 29, 2008

Global Leap Day Action Night – www.leapdayaction.org