Obama Nominates Oil Engineer, Head of REI for US Interior Secretary

Looking for balance between oil industry and conservation, president makes unconventional first pick for environment team

from UK Guardian

Sally Jewell

Barack Obama chose the head of the REI outdoor equipment stores to manage America’s wide open spaces on Wednesday, in the first pick of his second-term environment team.

The choice of Sally Jewell, an oil engineer who went on to win environmental awards, was unconventional. The post of interior secretary has generally gone to career politicians from western states. The outgoing secretary, Ken Salazar, was a Democratic senator from Colorado.

Jewell’s name had not been in circulation before Wednesday’s announcement, but she had apparently been on Obama’s radar for some time. She worked with the White House on healthcare reform in 2009 and on the Great Outdoors Initiative in 2011.

In choosing Jewell, Obama appeared to be striving for balance between the oil industry, which has been pressing to expand drilling on public lands and off the coast of Alaska, and conservation and wilderness groups.

Video: Black Mesa Dine & Appalachians Confront Peabody Coal in St. Louis, MO

An unprecedented coalition of Navajo (Dineh) residents of Black Mesa, AZ, Appalachian residents, St. Louis residents, military veterans and labor unions brought the fight for our future to Peabody’s HQ today. Nearly 100 of us had a raucous rally opened with a prayer by Black Mesa native Don Yellowman, followed by speeches demanding Peabody stop destabilizing the climate, forcing the Dineh off their land, and cheating workers out of their retirement benefits. Peabody representatives promised to accept a letter from Fern Benally and Don Yellowman, the Navajo residents of Black Mesa, but they broke their promise and called the police instead.

The Trail of Broken Treaties: From Wounded Knee to Idle No More

by Ron Jacobs / Counterpunch

American Indian Movement protest at Wounded Knee, 1973.

The American Indian Movement’s (AIM) best known and most controversial protest began in February 1973 in Wounded Knee, South Dakota, a small town on the Pine Ridge reservation. Wounded Knee Two began as a conflict within the Oglala Lakota (Sioux) tribe between the supporters of the tribal Chairman Richard Wilson and other tribal members who considered him to be a corrupt puppet of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). Like many other such conflicts, it had simmered for a while. In 1973, the disagreements between the two segments of the Pine Ridge Lakota Sioux created so much anger and division that both sides ended up arming themselves. The forces allied with Wilson, along with Federal law enforcement officials and US military, entered into a 71 day siege of the AIM forces. The AIM group included local citizens, national AIM members, prominent entertainment figures, and members of national philanthropic, religious, and legal organizations. National news organizations covered the entire 71 days of the siege and its aftermath.

The Return of the Anti-Roads Protesters!

Susanna Rustin / the Guardian

Can today’s eco-warriors recapture the ferocious energy of the 1990s anti-roads protests? As a huge road-building programme gears up, a new wave of activists are taking up the fight.

Stop the cuts … the ‘Combe Haven Defenders’ set up camp in the treetops to protest against a new link road between Bexhill and Hastings that will carve through countryside. Photograph: David Levene

It’s not yet 4pm but the sun is setting at Combe Haven. As it sinks below the winter landscape, its last rays illuminate the scene unfolding in the trees overhead.

Half a dozen young men and women, their faces mostly concealed by scarves, are perched on the branches of a big, old oak tree, securing the ropes that support a wooden platform they have suspended between it and another oak. They are discussing how best to hang an enormous net that has been donated by the fishing fleet at Hastings a few miles away. This will make a giant hammock, intended for those not comfortable in tree houses high above the ground.

Indiana (not her real name), a veteran of roads protests dating back to the early 1990s, says she may sleep in the net tonight. Her grandfather was a fisherman at Hastings and it was she who went to ask for it. Wrapped around the trunks and branches, the braided polypropylene can also impede the chainsaws, causing them to snag.

In a clearing on the other side of a waist-high barricade made of branches, a dozen men in hard hats and high-visibility jackets look on. They are specialist contractors working as high-court enforcement officers, figuring out how they will forcibly evict the protesters in the days or weeks ahead. Another dozen or so activists and legal observers are on the ground, chatting and making tea on a fire. As they watch their best climber clambering 50ft up, they explain how the platform has been positioned high in the crown of the tree so they cannot be approached and plucked out from above.

This is what protesters have dubbed the second battle of Hastings.

The Economics of Insurgency

Thoughts on Idle No More and Critical Infrastructure

by Shiri Pasternak

Thousands of First Nations ‘Idle No More’ protesters demand meeting

News reports are ablaze with reports of looming Indigenous blockades and economic disruption. As the Idle No More movement explodes into a new territory of political action, it bears to amplify the incredible economic leverage of First Nations today, and how frightened the government and industry are of their capacity to wield it.

In recent years, Access to Information (ATI) records obtained by journalists reveal a massive state-wide surveillance and “hot spot monitoring” operation coordinated between the Department of Indian Affairs, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), local security forces, natural resource and transportation ministries, border agencies, and industry stakeholders. These efforts have been explicitly mobilized to protect “critical infrastructure” from Indigenous attack.

Keren Kayemet Le Yisrael and Environmental Racism in Palestine

by Ben Lorber / article from the Lughnasadh 2012 issue of the Earth First! Journal

Since the idea of Zionism first gripped the minds of a few intellectuals and the limbs of many agrarian pioneers in the early 20th century, the state of Israel has represented its settlement of Palestine, and its uprooting of the Palestinian people, as a rejuvenation of the Earth. Determined to “make the desert bloom,” an international organization named the Jewish National Fund, or Keren Kayemet LeYisrael, planted forests, recreational parks, and nature reserves to cover over the ruins of Palestinian villages, as refugees were scattered far from the land upon which they and their ancestors had based their lives and livelihoods.

Today, while Israel portrays itself as a “green democracy,” an eco-friendly pioneer in agricultural techniques, desert ecology, water management and solar energy, Israeli factories drain toxic waste from occupied West Bank hilltops into Palestinian villages. Israeli overpumping of aquifers increases water scarcity and pollution, denying Palestinians access to vital water sources. By greenwashing the occupation, Israel hides its apartheid behind an environmentalist mirage and distracts public attention, not only from its brutal oppression of the Palestinian people,but  from its large-scale degradation of the Earth upon which these tragedies unfold.

Idle No More Hits Arizona as Part of Snowbowl Protest

by Anne Minard / Indian Country

The international Idle No More movement hit Arizona this week, in a freshly charged protest at Flagstaff City Hall over snowmaking with treated effluent at Arizona Snowbowl, a ski resort on the sacred San Francisco Peaks.

Flagstaff residents are accustomed to seeing Snowbowl protesters on the City Hall lawn – the most recent demonstration was just before Christmas, to coincide with Snowbowl’s opening day. But this week’s gathering on January 8 carried a bit more energy. For starters, the activists didn’t just hold signs; they opened the day in a circle of prayer and song. And the event drew a fuller-than-usual crowd.

World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?

by Chris Knight / Times Higher Education

The world has been waiting for this book. Others have attempted to persuade us that tribal people can teach us how to live. Most, however, have failed to convince, presenting us with yet another version of the Noble Savage myth. Jared Diamond is no romantic. He writes with conviction and erudition. It is probably no exaggeration to describe him as the most authoritative polymath of our age – the man who, in his 1997 book Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, explained the true reasons for the West’s ultimate dominance over the globe and in Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (2005), warned that this same civilisation may now be digging its own grave. In The World Until Yesterday, Diamond turns his massive erudition to an equally necessary project. The fact that Western civilisation conquered all does not necessarily make it sustainable or prove that we have superior ideas about bringing up children, keeping healthy or living well.

The Luddites And The Politics Of 21st Century Technology

by Ned Ludd

November 2011 to January 2013 is the 200th anniversary of the Luddite uprisings: a great opportunity to celebrate their struggle and to redress the wrongs done to them and their name. But why would a group of Earth First! activists, concerned primarily with protecting wilderness, be interested in a 200-year-old uprising based on a labor dispute involving textile workers in England? The conventional answer is that Luddism is an anti-technology, primitivist philosophy and that it has a tendency towards direct action, but the truth about its significance is both different and deeper.

The Luddites were not primitivists, and the opposition between capitalist, technocratic progressivism and a supposedly primitivist Luddism is a sterile argument, framed in terms which suit the techno-progressivists. The portrayal of the Luddites as people opposed to all technology and progress is a history written by the victors. It is ironic that while the ideology of progress through technology has hardened into a rigid dogma, which must condemn the slightest criticism as “anti-science,” in fact, the Luddites opposed only technology “hurtful to Commonality” (i.e. to the common good). They were involved in a struggle for workers’ rights that focused on particular machines that were destroying their trades and livelihoods, and they destroyed those machines whilst leaving others alone. The crucial significance of Luddism is that, almost uniquely amongst radical movements, it addresses both the technological and social aspects of domination, and it is vital that we hold both of these together.

Happy Birthday Panagioti, Stay Wild, Stay Weird

This Photoshopped image of Panagioti, which first appeared in this Lake Worth Wingnut article is, despite being doctored, a pretty decent metaphor for the inner fire of this biocentric patriot. You can imagine that he used the sword in his hand to do battle against the imperialist flag behind him. You could also imagine that his pants became tattered in a heated orgy with a badger and a mountain lion.

by Russ McSpadden

If industrial civilization were to collapse any time soon–and its looking like it could happen any day now–it’d be in no small part due to the rather outrageous and tireless misadventures of a little known biocentric biped called Panagioti. 

Though he has no formal education past 10th grade — “diploma-free and proud” as he’d say — you’d be hard pressed to find a smarter and more politically influential animal amongst the more radical environmental milieu, especially in the South. He’s also a real sweetheart, a soon-to-be-father, my best friend and all around nice guy and superhero.

And over the years I’ve had the honor of  witnessing,  participating, and hearing stories of some of the nobler, crazier, illegaler, stupider, and just plane unbelievable acts of resistance and folly he’s helped organize. And, since its his birthday today, I thought I might embarrass him a little and honor him in some small way by sharing a smattering of those stories. I invite others (and especially family) to add their own accounts in the comments section, should they be inclined.