Most of the photos are from me. (The ones that I posted are here and here)
There were a various actions against the tar sands that day. People out in London, England even joined the action. Here in Canada, RBC (the Royal Bank of Canada) was the main Fossil Fool target. That bank is the leading financier behind the tar sands.
Compared with other local campaigning against RBC tar sands financing here, there was a lot more tension at the protest at the first RBC bank building we went to on the Fossil Fools day of action. Just leafletting inside an RBC building has been enough to get us into a confrontation (of sorts) with police though. Security staff and police officers always are at hand to defend corporations like RBC by preventing people from voicing concerns on company property.
That said, I still don’t appreciate conflicts (or potential conflicts) with police and security staff. That sort of excitement doesn’t work for me, and I’m generally not hostile towards police officers and security workers. There are a lot of problems police/security systems — given how they are bound up with a much wider status quo — but I don’t find targetting police and security workers to be a productive way of confronting those problems. We’ve got to find ways to change and replace the mainstream systems that employ those people. If there are no dirty banks (for instance), then the police and security forces can’t defend them.
Basically, I compare Olympics marketing imagery and rhetoric with the living conditions and activism of indigenous peoples here in Canada. (The post is about a Canada-wide context, more so than it’s about Vancouver and the VAN Organizing Committee per se.)
I invite you to skip the blurb about me, at the start of the post.
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Lisa helped to edit the writing, and Gwen fixed formatting problems that I had left in there.
I also appreciate other help from Laura, Annick, and Steve.
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The post stems from a relatively brief e-mail that I had sent in to Sociological Images back on May 24th, 2009. After writing some thoughts on Flickr posts here and here, I had sent the e-mail to the web site editors to connect the same sorts of native issues to Olympics marketing that already was circulated around here in Canada.
Then, after May, I published a piece about some native activism in Ontario, and I became very involved in pro-native campaigning against the tar sands — for the sake of wider climate justice. (I have posted about climate justice issues here.) (So far, I mainly have been a climate justice activist in a local Mobilization for Climate Justice group; but I also have started to form collaborative connections with people in other areas of the U.S. and Canada.) And, over the past two weeks, I was very involved in anti-Olympic protest organizing, which I mainly joined because of how the day of action was connected with tar sands issues.
In a “Feminism and Race” Women’s Studies grad course that I was in last term, I also worked through some indigenous and climate justice issues. That course helped a lot with the writing that I did for the Sociological Images post.
“Canadians increasingly live in a confusion of values. A 2008 survey by the Globe and Mail found that while 79 percent of respondents said the tar sands are good for Alberta and Canada, more than half of those respondents (55 percent) said that the sands were not good for the environment. The obvious contradiction can be justified only by minimizing or disconnecting oneself from the importance of [natural environments]. The problem is that global warming and the rapid dying out of species makes this level of self-deception increasingly dangerous.”
“Canada –already the largest oil supplier to the U.S.–pumped out record exports south of the border this summer, as Alberta’s oilsands crude fill the gaps left by competitors.
U.S. imports of crude oil from Canada rose 5.4 per cent in July to the highest monthly level in at least 36 years, according to figures released by the U.S. Energy Department.”
“Canada is the largest exporter of crude oil to the U.S. and has increased the amount it ships as OPEC countries have cut back.
Michael Glotz-Richter (in this post) -
“Studies have shown that, on average, most cars are parked for 23 hours a day. Do we really want to use so much valuable space for storing vehicles?”
The start of that post conveys how parked cars are like elephants in our rooms (so to speak); that is, the post elaborates on how we refuse to acknowledge and re-assess how much space we are devoting to automobile parking.
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Matthew Blackett on the Spacing Toronto blog -
“42 Folding Bikes vs. One Car”
( “Sometimes it takes a visual illustration to make the strongest argument.” …)
(Here is a larger version of the second image shown there.)
“Instead of making more room on the street for idle cars, we should be making room for more people. We should [claim] space to stroll, shop, sit and socialize.”
“Our unrelenting fixation on cheap and easy driving has blinded us from recognizing this simple fact: More than five decades spent adding capacity is proof that increasing the parking supply will not solve the problem. We have to decrease demand.”
“Unfortunately we’ve come to regard suburban retail [complexes], with their acres of parking lots, as the norm. As a result, we insist that a convenient parking place should be waiting for us at the end of every car trip. How much longer will we try to satisfy such an unrealistic expectation? How much are we willing to sacrifice to perpetuate this fantasy? When will we realize how much we’ve already lost in this foolish pursuit?”
(As I occasionally do, I have replaced a couple of the words there with slightly different ones that fit better with my own point of view.)
This Diggers’ Song video was posted during the summer Climate Camp in England -
With that song, these Climate Campers have affiliated themselves with previous attempts to share and maintain “a common treasury for all” — which some simply would describe as a “commons.”
Like the Diggers, the Climate Campers rally around common environments — protected or claimed through civil disobedience, and other activism. At a very basic level, their goals and tactics are similar.
But the Climate Camps and the Diggers have approached these common environments from different angles. While the Climate Campers have been more inclined to approach fields as meeting places, and as launching-off points for nearby protests, the Diggers attempted to claim lands that could be farmed in common. They mainly were after agricultural lands which they might have used to sustain farming collectives. Food concerns have not been central at Climate Camps, but food issues are not completely off the ‘map’ at Climate Camps either — as this Climate Camp TV video about fruit smoothies indicates. Yet, as Climate Campers have focused on greenhouse gases, and on other fossil fuel pollution released into our common atmosphere, it seems that they haven’t devoted much attention to emissions from industrial agriculture, and other mainstream food systems. (Here is a post that addresses interconnections between food systems and greenhouse gas emissions — approached through generalized statistical estimates.)
I’m raising those points about distinct focuses and limitations to compare the two approaches to common environments.
“People like to be close to oceans, mountains and trees. Even in the most urban environments, it is reflected in real estate prices: if you want a view of the trees of Central Park, it’ll cost you. Office buildings have atriums and plants; we give flowers to the sick and the beloved and return home to watch Animal Planet and the Discovery Channel. We keep pets, which are a weird combination of constructed things (cats and dogs were bred for human companionship), surrogate people and conduits to the natural world. And many of us seek to escape our manufactured environments whenever we can — to hike, camp, canoe or hunt.”
“Many studies show that even a limited dose of nature, like a chance to look at the outside world through a window, is good for your health. Hospitalized patients heal more quickly; prisoners get sick less often. Being in the wild reduces stress; spending time with a pet enhances the lives of everyone from autistic children to Alzheimer’s patients. The author Richard Louv argues that modern children suffer from ‘nature-deficit disorder’ because they have been shut out from the … benefits of … contact with the natural world.”
Yet, while “some of the natural world is appealing, some of it is terrifying and some of it grosses us out. Modern people don’t want to be dropped naked into a swamp.”
“You might think that technology could provide a simulacrum of nature with all the bad parts scrubbed out. But attempts to do so have turned out to be interesting failures. There is a fortune to be made, for instance, by building a robot that children would respond to as if it were an animal. There have been many attempts, but they don’t evoke anywhere near the same responses as puppies, kittens or even hamsters. They are toys, not companions. Or consider a recent study by the University of Washington psychologist Peter H. Kahn Jr. and his colleagues. They put 50-inch high-definition televisions in the windowless offices of faculty and staff members to provide a live view of a natural scene. People liked this, but in another study that measured heart-rate recovery from stress, the HDTVs were shown to be worthless, no better than staring at a blank wall. What did help with stress was giving people an actual plate-glass window looking out upon actual greenery.
All of this provides a different sort of argument for the preservation of nature. Put aside for the moment practical considerations like the need for clean air and water.” “Look at it from the coldblooded standpoint of the enhancement of the happiness of our everyday lives.” “Natural habitats provide significant sources of pleasure for modern humans. We intuitively grasp this, and this knowledge underlies the anxiety that we feel about nature’s loss.”
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Related points from Janet Kauffman (in this article) -
“Recent research shows that if a stream looks ‘cleaned up’ to the [modern] human eye, it’s a disaster for the stream and everything in it. A stream needs a … mix of shrubs, a layering of foliage and root systems, and leaf litter and woody debris in the water to stay healthy and thrive.”
Inasmuch as that opposition to the Tiny Township dump is a ‘Not-in-my-backyard’ (NIMBY) campaign, it is a lot more justifiable, relative to other such battles. In the Waging Nonviolence post there is some background about the local significance of the conflict. More specifically: there are details about the acquifier under and around the potential landfill site, with details about the indigenous situation in the area.
That post also (more implicitly) points out how the campaign isn’t just about NIMBY issues — since the acquifier under the potential landfill site is connected into the Great Lakes. After entering Lake Huron through Georgian Bay, water contamination from the dumping grounds would spread through the rest of the Great Lakes.
Yet, waste also would reach other areas if it is dumped there instead.
Other landfill sites will be filled up and contaminated if we continue to churn out so much waste.
Jerrold Kessel and Pierre Klochendler (in this article) -
A recent “Human Rights Watch (HRW) report focuses on six cases of Israeli drone-launched missile attacks in which 29 Palestinian civilians, eight of them children, were killed. Based on cross-referenced eyewitness accounts corroborated by doctors, as well as ballistics and forensic evidence collected on the attack sites, the report asserts that ‘in none of the cases did HRW find evidence that Palestinian fighters were present in the immediate area of the attack at the time.’ ”
“Marc Garlasco, senior military analyst at the emergencies program of HRW, estimates that at least 87 civilians were killed in 42 drone attacks.”
“Israel is the world leader in drone technology.”
“Israeli drones have advanced sensors, combining radars, electro- optical and infrared cameras, and lasers providing real time imaging by day and night.”
“According to Palestinian sources, 900 civilians were killed during the military operations, among a total of more than 1,400 killed. The HRW report says a third of the fatalities were from drone-launched missiles. Israeli sources put the civilian death toll at 300.”
David Chernushenko’s perspective on two European cities (specifically, Stockholm — “a northern city that has plenty of ups and downs, and cold”; and Freiburg — a city “bordering on Germany’s Black Forest mountains”) -
“What strikes the Canadian visitor is just how ordinary cycling seems to be in the lives of the locals. It is not a big deal to choose to ride somewhere. It does not involve special clothes, helmets, gloves and fancy bikes. Herds of children roll by on their way to school together. Couples head off to work. An older lady rides by with a load of groceries in the rear panniers, and a lapdog in the front basket.”
“In Copenhagen I saw people using cargo bikes to cart their kids all over the place. I rarely saw an adult wearing a helmet. It made an impression on me. This lack of protective headgear — or any special bike gear, for that matter — is one of the things that, to my eye, made biking in Copenhagen seem so remarkably convenient, casual, safe and part of regular daily life. It didn’t matter what you’re wearing. In Copenhagen you just hop on a bike and go.
The sheer sense of normalcy conveyed by streets filled with helmetless, kid-toting Danish cyclists seemed to me to do more to encourage bicycling and promote safety than any personal equipment or piece of infrastructure I’d ever seen back home. And the numbers back that up. Somehow, despite the lack of headgear, Danish, German and Dutch cyclist injury and fatality rates are a fraction of our own [in New York].
We know from the work of Peter Jacobsen that one of the most surefire ways to make urban bike transportation safer is to increase the number of cyclists on city streets. There are a lot of proven and effective ways to encourage more people to get on bikes. Compelling everyone to strap a styrofoam shell to their head is not one of them — at least not in the world cities with the safest streets for cyclists.”
Basically, permablitzes are community landscaping events, during which land is re-worked based on permaculture principles. Permablitzers generally have been re-working others’ private property (e.g. their backyards) during these events
(so far, at least).
“For those who haven’t been to one, a permablitz is a kind of one day permaculture-styled backyard (or frontyard) makeover, with free workshops, fun and food — all based on volunteerism and a model of reciprocity. Anyone can come, and for many it’s their first experience with permaculture design or food gardening. If you come to three or so, we can help organise one at your house.”
“They can be fantastically good days helping people on the road to some serious food production, and some beautiful gardens can result.
“The permablitz concept started here in Melbourne in 2006 through a collaboration between permaculture student/teacher Dan Palmer and a South American community group in Melbourne’s outer eastern suburbs. I was lucky enough to be involved in the first one thanks to my friendship with Dan. Since, we’ve blitzed all around the city, with renters, in housing estates, on big properties, on tiny ones, in community gardens and schools”
“Nobody funds us — so far our efforts organising and administering blitzes (except working with the Dandenong Development Board, and running courses) have been entirely voluntary. There’s an evolving loose knit crew of people who chip in. We’re looking at incorporating as a non-profit soon though so some of this will be a bit more formalised soon.”
“We’d like to see more local blitz groups form, so the concept can spread nodally. The command and control alternative sounds like too much work anyway”
“We’ve got a short manual for people wanting to organise blitzes elsewhere. Email us permablitz@gmail.com if you’d like a copy.”
