How can we forget? Exxon Valdez and the Kirby Barge

"​The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting​," wrote Milan Kundera.  

Many people remain blind to or unaware of the power that must be challenged if we are going to revolutionize our economic and political systems to align their interests with justice and ecological integrity.  This is due partly because of a massive disinformation campaign by corporate and political elites, and partly because everything we do--heating our homes or transporting ourselves to work--is inextricably bound to these power structures that feed us toxic and dirty energy.  If this energy is in everything, we do not have a choice.  If we do not have a choice, we can slowly become blind to alternatives.    

It is sadly fitting that on the 25th anniversary of the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Prince William Sound in Alaska, we are dealing with another ship-caused oil spill,  this time in Houston and Galveston after a barge owned by Kirby Inland Marine Co. leaked bunker fuel into the Gulf of Mexico.  While the size of the spill is sixty times smaller than Exxon Valdez spill (11 million gallons from the Valdez vs 170,000 gallons from the barge), the spill could not have come at a worse time for the birds that are migrating to and from the area.  (News just in: We are also dealing with another oil spill in Lake Michigan.  The culprit, BP.)

Just when we thought that we learned lessons from Exxon Valdez, that the BP Deepwater Horizon spill was fading into distant memory, just when politicians (and some scientists, and, maybe even the President) delusionally support of the Keystone XL pipeline by saying that its ecological effects are minimal or could be mitigated, we are presented with not one, but two oil spills.  Perhaps this is a good thing.  Perhaps 

We need to use these events to keep ourselves and the masses from forgetting, from losing focus on the struggles that lie in every next step.  We need to use these events to (re)orient ourselves to strategically challenge and fight the culprits of socioecological havoc and injustice of all kinds.  

We cannot forget that challenging big oil means confronting hegemonic power.  We must use these events, as Naomi Klein says, to make the increasingly popular calls for fundamental and systemic reform powerful.    

The Keystone XL pipeline: Youth protests

Four days after I moved to Washington, DC, on 28 August, 2014,I was fortunate enough to find my way into the 50th anniversary celebrations of the March on Washington.  While the event was no protest, the goal was clear--direct political messaging, in this case about the confluences of racial and economic injustice.  That day provided my first taste of attending more politically charged events in this city.  Fast forward through a heated anti-drone summit by CODEPINK and a peace vigil in solidarity against the Keystone XL pipeline to today, when several hundred youth activists marched from the Red Square at Georgetown University to The White House to engage in civil disobedience dissent action to send a simple, concise, and extremely political message to President Barack Obama--say no to the construction of the northern leg of the Keystone XL pipeline.

Saying no to the pipeline sets the stage for a course correction on President Obama's "all of the above" energy policy, which is basically this: we can combat the social and ecological dimensions of climate change while still expanding offshore oil drilling, promoting fracking, continuing mountaintop removal, and becoming even bigger trade partners with Canada by importing their ecologically devastating oil.  How such an energy policy can reduce America's dependence on fossil fuels and lighten this culture's burden on the world I do not know, but at the very least saying no to the pipeline is a serious symbolic commitment that activists can gather around to wean this country and the world of toxic and climate change-inducing fossil fuel energy.

Today, I am energized by the spirit of young climate change activists who came in buses and cars from all across the country and who zip-tied themselves to The White House fence and got arrested, with the intention of showing President Obama that the youth cares deeply about the causes and effects of climate change--physical, economic, social, political, ecological.  I thus revive this blog from its hibernation by focusing my next several posts on the Keystone XL pipeline, both to educate myself and to provide you with information about the spectrum of issues that tar sands and the Keystone XL pipeline affects.

My next posts will focus on:

• the science and engineering behind tar sands extraction, processing, and transport
• a brief foray into the social implications of tar sands
• the ecological impacts of tar sands, now and possible
• arrest, direct action, and the legal issues surrounding arrest for civil disobedience and dissent
• the climate change movement's relation to other social movements
• the State Department's environmental impact statement 

Responses to this culture's addiction to oil cannot look at alternatives that continue to bolster the political, economic, and technological paradigm that has us locked in to degrading our Earth to the benefit of a few.  Tar sands represent the very worst things about the risks our government and corporations are willing to take to keep themselves in power.  Just take a look at a very real and ongoing tar sands disaster on the Kalamazoo River--here, here, here and here--in my state of Michigan.  More than three years and close to a billion dollars in clean-up efforts later, who knows when the nightmare will end. 

For now, I leave you with photos I took today during the dissent.

FRACK YOU: "Get used to it."

Jeff Dick is the Chair of Geological and Environmental Sciences at Youngstown State University, and a proponent of fracking. His past with the oil and gas industry has led him to trust them so much so that he has leased his own land to a company to frack for natural gas. He believes that the environmental regulatory agencies of Ohio are doing a good enough job to keep him safe from the potential ill effects of fracking. In fact, he believes that fracking causes little to no ecological harm or pollution. To those people who oppose fracking in rural Ohio, in what Dick has called his little "patch of paradise", he says, well, "Get used to it."

...[J]ust like in those other states [like Texas] where the culture of the people is very accepting of it, I believe with time, the culture of people here in Ohio is going to shift to where they say this is acceptable. Obviously to a lot of people it won't be acceptable, but probably...a good number of people, and I'd suggest probably...a majority of people, because that's where we're at right now, I believe, are accepting of this industry. You have to keep in mind, and this is very important, that eastern Ohio has been economically depressed for a very long time. And so, this is a big opportunity for new industry to come into this area and provide new jobs and all sorts of economic growth opportunities. And that's quite frankly why the majority of people throughout this region are behind this oil and gas development.

So, let us take sand from Leopold's Sand County in Wisconsin so that those in Ohio and North Dakota and Pennsylvania and New York can shove it, mixed with proprietary chemical blends, deep into the ground so that we can the energy we want today. Let us take so much sand away that sand no longer remains in Sand County. The lure of temporary jobs paying eighteen dollars an hour that result in nearly permanent geologic and ecological degradation can be too much for county boards to resist. And be sure to know that your wastewater treatment facility is doing all that it can to keep your drinking water safe from the chemicals.

You see, it just takes getting used to. Just like people in Delray eventually got used to noxious fumes from an incinerator in their backyard. Just like the people in the Maldives will get used to their country being submerged bit by bit into the ocean because of climate change. It'll be a few years before their country is entirely gone. By that time, they will have gotten used to it, because when it comes down to it, oil and gas is here to stay.

A chink in the armor may have been found

The recent Occupy movement has meant more to me than just financial reform. It has exposed to the public the incredible greed of corporations and wealthy individuals, and an inhumane lack of compassion on part of the government and private sector for those that are most vulnerable, those that are caught in the circles and tentacles of poverty and injustice and degraded environments. I hope you see the threads and connections, too. It is hard to deny the omnipresence of corporatism in our lives. Our conversations are mediated through their gizmos, our politicians are influenced by their monies, our food is "produced" in their labs, our life savings are eaten up in instants.

In class one day, Professor Parson, the most brilliant person I have met, was talking about an experience that he has had several times over. He has the in in policy circles; he has the in on meetings in which the head honchos of major corporations, these powerful, rich people, get together and discuss policy issues regarding the environment. After days of discussion, many of them end up hanging their heads in defeat, saying, "We just need to educate the next generation to make better choices."

I am a student (and employee?) at the University of Michigan. Each year, a couple of large student groups and the Career Center in the College of Engineering hold Career Fair--a two-day long event that brings recruiters to campus. You see tons of engineering students, dressed up in business-casual attire, lined up waiting to be told impersonally to apply for any positions "on the company website." You can assume who is doing the recruiting...all the big guns--defense contractors, oil exploration corporations, mining companies.

And so it is particularly defeatist, ironic, and hypocritical of these very rich men and corporations, who (corporations are people, too, right?) have their sway in policy circles, to say that we should leave it to the next generation to solve the myriad of issues that face us. But, it is true that the lifeblood of these large corporations is the young; corporations prey on the young to continue their legacies, to continue to buy their products. The young can be lured by six-figure salaries and quick repayment of their debts. Having been through an undergraduate engineering degree at the University of Michigan, I know that engineers are not made to think about the consequences of engineering. And so, many undergraduates may have never heard about Engineers Without Borders, or the phrase "appropriate technology." Indeed, the government-industry-military-university complex does not train these engineers to be activists. Rather, they train them to be passively engaged in violent and Earth-raping activities.

Furthermore, the way large bureaucracies are set up, there is very little individual blame or responsibility put on engineers. Write Martin and Schinzinger in their book Ethics in Engineering,

Large-scale engineering projects involve fragmentation of work. Each person makes only a small contribution to something much larger. Moreover, the final product is often physically removed from one's immediate workplace, creating the kind of "distancing" that [Stanley] Milgram [who conducted the famous experiments in which he concluded that people are willing to abandon personal accountability when placed under authority] identified as encouraging a lessened sense of personal accountability. (pg. 94)

Such lack of accountability allows young people to easily convince themselves that what they are doing is benign, and allows their moral compasses to be swayed by hierarchy. While talking about corporatism and having dinner with Rebecca the other night, we talked about the chink in the (corporate) armor that Professor Larimore had brought up in August. She said, "Corporations feed on young people. They are always looking for new, young recruits." There are many reasons why, it seems.

It is ultimately clear to me that these corporations must be brought down, or at least their structure--where they are no longer allowed and privileged and encouraged to endure forever--must be restored to "the original definition...as an association granted temporary privileges for the purpose of carrying out some socially useful task, with charters that must be reviewed and renewed periodically by state legislatures," as Scott Russell Sanders writes in his essay, Breaking the Spell of Money, in Orion.

But I really do think Rebecca has found one of the weaker spots of corporatism--the need for new blood.

What does peace mean to you?

While both require planning, perseverance, and a steadfastness, peace stands in stark contrast to war. Peace preserves, accepts, and cherishes differences. War obliterates them.

I cannot say whether or not we are closer to living a life of peace or not, particularly when it comes down to the different cultures that make up this human world. Peace is likely not going to come from a compromise of our differences. Indeed, if even Americans cannot resolve their differences through compromise, then how can we expect the Western world to compromise on their differences with people in the East? Peace will come only when we accept the differences that exist. But acceptance is only a first step. We must cherish the differences, while at the same time making an intense effort at truly understanding why people would resort to flying planes into buildings. And so today, a decade on, how has peace influenced the debate on conflict resolution?

It amazes me that we think humans are the greatest thing in the world, but when it comes down to our differences, we will resort to violence to make sure that power stays concentrated with certain people. There is a clear discrepancy, it seems then, between doing all that we can to keep humanity alive, and then resorting to violence to kill humans when we don't agree. Of course, someone that has power might say then that it is in the interest of the broader humanity that their power is being used as violence against others, but that is unjustifiable.

Just as with many of the most complicated issues of our time, words have jumbled meanings. War can happen in the name of peace, and people convince themselves that this must be true. But what about this statement?

Since the Second World War, more than four fifths of the people killed in war have been civilians.

And despite the grief that comes with the loss of human life, there are many more dimensions that we don't think about when we think of war, and the environment is one of those things. How is the Earth's capacity for life changed when we war? Asked another way, what do our differences mean for the environment? Well, differences themselves are borne of the environment. Cultures are outcomes of environmental conditions, different ones, all over the world. This cannot be denied. And so when we resort to violence, we not only kill people, but we disturb and disrupt the ecosystems that build a culture.

There are many historical cases in which the ecological degradation has been used as a weapon to wipe people out, to oppress. In a prescient piece The environmental damage of war in Iraq from The Guardian, written eight years ago before the war, the potential ecologically degrading outcomes of war in Iraq were explored in the context of previous wars, both in the Balkans and in the Middle East:

During the 1991 war devastating damage was done to the oil industry in Kuwait. Iraqi forces destroyed more than seven hundred oil wells in Kuwait, spilling sixty million barrels of oil. Over ten million cubic metres of soil was still contaminated as late as 1998. A major groundwater aquifer, two fifths of Kuwait's entire freshwater reserve, remains contaminated to this day. Ten million barrels or oil were released into the Gulf, affecting coastline along 1500 km and costing more than $700 million to clean up. During the nine months that the wells burned, average air temperatures fell by 10 degrees C as a result of reduced light from the sun. The costs of environmental damage were estimated at $40 billion. Estimates of the numbers likely to die as a result of the air pollution effects were put at about a thousand. Since Iraq has the second largest proven oil reserves of any nation on earth, the potential environmental damage caused by destruction of oil facilities during a new war must be enormous.

Other environmental effects of the 1991 Gulf War included destruction of sewage treatment plants in Kuwait, resulting in the discharge of over 50,000 cubic metres of raw sewage every day into Kuwait Bay.

Secondly, specific weapons likely to be used against Iraq will also create environmental damage. Top of the list of concern are depleted uranium (DU) projectiles.

Guess what? Depleted uranium has wreaked havoc in Iraq. Surprised?

When it comes to "just war theory", both jus in bello and jus ad bellum, how do we hold warring factions to these customs that make attempts at doing "minimal damage to the environment"? Is it even possible? The government and corporations we patronise deal with the issues of defense and war on a day-to-day basis. They in fact make a huge profit from war. The tentacles of war have weaved their way into each and every one of our communities, in all fifty states, from manufacturing to financing to politics to constitutional amendments. So how can we think about peace when war pays the bills?

There is a lack of peace within us. In fact, being peaceful and thoughtful is made to seem passive and subservient. When we find it tasteful to use guns against other people, and use guns as a sign of power and control, we will no doubt find it tasteful to use bombs to blow tops off of mountains to reach for coal - indeed this is a sign of power and control, not over people in this case, but the environment. What may be hindering our cause to find harmony and peace with nature is the violence we are able to perpetrate against our own kind. Or maybe our ability and willingness to perpetrate violence against nature, beautiful and delicate, is standing in the way of finding peace with our own kind. In the end, if we cannot find peace within us, we cannot find peace without us. 

I believe that if we find peace within ourselves and where we are, we can radically redefine notions of "progress" and "community." When I say peace, I in no way mean complacency. When I say peace, I mean that we recognise, understand and internalise our place in the world, our place in our communities, our place within our families, and our place in our own minds and bodies. Being at peace doesn't necessarily mean being satisfied with where we are ethically and morally; clearly, given our increasingly complex world, much of the complexity of which is man-made, there are ways in which we need to be redefining what it means to interact with each other, what it means to be a good citizen and a good steward. As a society as a whole, we are far from the ethical, moral and spiritual heights we need to be at to fully understand our impact on other humans, as well as the environment. There is no way we can envision a sustainable future when we find peace in violence. But if we can find peace in where we are materially and in physical place, we will have reached some level of peaceableness with the environment. Peace with the environment allows us the time to think and appreciate about its marvels, of which humans are one. Such a peace will not allow us to use violent force against any aspect of our environment, humans included. 

What does peace mean to you?

FRACK YOU - A toxic child worsens a toxic legacy

Fracking seems like the dirty lovechild of mountaintop removal (e.g. for coal) and drilling for oil, a child that is just way crazier than what the genes of its parents would make you imagine.

Like drilling for oil, the natural gas that fracking tries to reach is stored underground, thousands of feet underground. But rather than having the pressure of the oil well pump oil to the surface (think of how the Macondo well spewed high-pressure oil into the Gulf), to get the natural gas, you have to fracture the rock structures in which the gas is trapped. This fracturing requires significant amounts of water, and of course, toxic chemicals (I mean, it just wouldn't be fun without toxic chemicals, right?!). This is a trait inherited from fracking's other parent, mountaintop removal. Just like mountaintop removal, we basically need to blow apart rock to release what it is we want. Mountaintop removal exposes coal, and fracking releases natural gas. What mountaintop removal is capable of doing, and has done to wonderful effect, is contaminate streams and on-land water sources (while at the same time potentially burying them altogether, drastically changing ecosystems). Fracking takes this a step further; fracking contaminates surface water and ground water and aquifers. The toxic brew of chemicals and water from the fracturing of rocks is either stored in containment ponds (basically a liquid landfill, actually just like the storage of sludge from mountaintop removal! Like parent, like child!), or released into streams and rivers. Of course, water treatment facilities are not equipped to treat water for the chemicals used in fracking.

Hmmm, so we're told that fracking is different, that it is safe, and that it is "better" for the environment. Well, it is hard for me to see the difference between what we've done in the past, and what we're doing now. Indeed, a toxic child is continuing and worsening a toxic legacy, just with a different face, a doe-eyed face. So in the end, while natural gas is "cleaner burning" than coal or oil, and releases more energy per unit mass of fuel, it still doesn't address the issue of what it is that is driving ecological degradation - a constant thirst for energy at any cost, a constant appetite to dominate nature, a willingness to treat air and water as dumping grounds. I would hope that people that are pressured into leasing their land for fracking can understand this. And I hope that my parents and their neighbours can fight the companies trying to get their land to frack it up.

On risk

After a wonderful discussion about food in class last night, Lydia and Samantha stayed after class to keep me company while I ate (the students brought in wonderful food for a potluck). After Samantha left, Lydia and I talked for an hour about, of course, the environment and government, she being in the School of Public Policy. She used a term that was insightful, and one that we don't necessarily think about in our daily lives, and one that I have not used at all in the last year - risk.

We take risks all day, every day. Many of us don't realise that some actions are risky, but that doesn't stop us from doing them. Some of us decide to get into cars, and drive ourselves around. We put our complete faith in other people, hoping that they won't drive, from the other oncoming lane, into your lane, at fifty miles per hour. As a cyclist, you are even more vulnerable, and several people I know have been hit by cars. When we decide to heat food up in the microwave in plastic containers, we accept, whether we want to or not, the risks of plastics and plasticisers leeching into our food. When we decide to pass through a full-body scanner at the airport, there are risks to developing some complication, no matter how small those risks may be. In fact, the standards that are set by the government, be they for car crash safety, whether or not a plastic is microwavable, or for X-ray imaging, are set by evaluating the risks for all of these actions. There is nothing that is not risky with these sorts of standards. Someone, somewhere, will experience side effects of medication - we run that risk. Risk is inherent and calculated into whether or not an oil exploration company will decide to drill into an exploratory oil well - I am absolutely sure those at BP, Halliburton and Transocean had some conversation about the risk. Whether they decided to do something about it or not, that is a different story.

But in our daily lives, how much do we think about the risks of our actions ruining the environment? There almost seems to be a tacit acceptance of those risks in favour of "progress" (1, 2, 3) and "development" (1, 2). Any acceptance of how we have behaved so far only legitimises the acceptance of these risks. On the other hand, what do we risk if we change our behaviour? What do we risk if we did choose to live under the paradigm of sufficiency, rather than efficiency (1, 2, 3) and neoliberal economic growth? We risk the staggering and unquantifiable - we risk living with and within the limits and capacity of Earth rather than forcefully and violently against those boundaries. We risk being better to other people and animals. We risk not filling up landfills to their created capacity. We risk preservation and conservation. Are we willing to take that risk?

On ownership

One of the defining concepts of our society is the notion of ownership. This goes far beyond the territorialism that animals may display to mark and guard their places of habitat. Human notions of ownership stretch beyond the bounds of their habitat. We have a system in place which monetarily values places other than habitat in a way that drives humans to "own" or "buy the rights" to those places. For example, much of the land in the US is actually leased to oil and gas companies for drilling (and this has not stopped those companies from trying to drill offshore, in virgin waters). But we also want to stretch our influence to the habitats of other humans, too. Fracking for natural gas is a great example - people from elsewhere are trying to buy off people from elsewhere because those people are unfortunate enough to have natural gas bound up in geologic structures under their land. In fact, our knowledge revolves around how we can own what nature hides - physical laws, chemical reactions and photosynthesis. In this sense, ownership leads to another sort of exploitation - how might we use nature and modify how it works such that we can derive the most monetary gain? Our need for ownership stretches far beyond land on Earth. Here is a woman that claims to have bought the rights to the Sun (thanks for this, Sherri!), and she fully intends to charge all users of the Sun.

It is fascinating how humans, that live individually on time scales of decades, can "own" something that has existed long before they did, and will continue to exist long after they are gone. Notions of ownership have in fact produced just the opposite of what we would want - what we would want is for our nature to sustain us for as long as possible, but in our quest to own, we have degraded. Just the reverse of how we think is what might be more logical- we are owned by this land, this air and this water, and our fate is tied to our respect to those forces.

Ownership also plays a significant part in our daily lives, and its influence also leads to much waste and trash. My laptop computer is now seven years old; it hobbles along, and at times sounds like a jet aircraft at full throttle trying to take off. I have not yet bought a new computer. In fact, I have used the computer just a couple of times in the past four or five months. Many of you might say, "How have you been living so long without a computer?" My answer is simple - there are computers in my lab, and all around campus, and so I don't need one of my own. I guess it would be more "convenient" to have one of my own, so I would not  have to bug my housemates to look something up every now and then (although I think I may have asked them just a few times in the past few months). Had I felt the need to own a computer of my own, I would have had to acquiesce to all of the trash and violence associated with such a purchase. (I know there are tons of people who hoard used computers and sell them - that may be an option.) But in general, there are things that all of us don't need to have, and maybe we can make due with just one lawnmower for a row of five homes, or and older family may be able to hand toys down to a younger family. A refusal to have one's own may in fact lead to stronger, more resilient social bonds.