toxins – 350orbust

Mother Puts Body On Line to Prevent “Toxic Trespass” From Fracking

May 3, 2013 by Christine

Dr. Sandra Steingraber is a biologist, a mother, and a cancer survivor. She recently went to jail for 15 days after being sentenced for trespassing on a gas compression rig last month owned by the Inergy gas company, near her home in the Finger Lakes region of New York state. As a fellow mother, and guardian of future generations, I am grateful from the bottom of my heart to Dr. Steingraber for her courageous stand, and consider her a role model.

Dr. Steingraber wrote the letter below from her cell last month. It was first posted on Common Dreams:

This morning – I have no idea what time this morning, as there are no clocks in jail, and the florescent lights are on all night long – I heard the familiar chirping of English sparrows and the liquid notes of a cardinal. And there seemed to be another bird too – one who sang a burbling tune. Not a robin–wren? The buzzing, banging, clanking of jail and the growled announcements of guards on their two-way radios – which also go on all night – drowned it out. But the world, I knew, was out there somewhere.

The best way to deal with jail is to exude patience, and wrap it around a core of resolve and surrender. According to New York state law, all inmates upon arrival are isolated from the general population until they are tested for tuberculosis and that test comes back negative. Typically, that takes three days. Isolation means you are locked inside your cell with no access to the phone (the phone for cell block D happens to be located, tantalizingly, four feet from my bars – just out of reach); no access to books (the two books I have in my cell, lent to me by an empathetic inmate, are the Bible and Nora Roberts’ Carolina Moon, which is a 470-page paperback whose opening sentence is, “She woke in the body of a dead friend.”); and, of course, no access to wi fi, cell phones, e-mail or the internet.

I am writing with a borrowed pencil on the back of the “Chemung County Inmate Request Form,” which is a half sheet of paper. I am writing small and revising in my head. (Forgive the paragraphing – I’m trying to save space.)

Yesterday, I was told that no medical personnel were available to administer my TB test. When I was called down to the nurse this morning, she asked why I didn’t have my TB test yesterday. Of course, she was available yesterday. The resulting delay means that I will join the prison population and be released from 24 hour lock-down on Monday, rather than Sunday.

Frustration will be counter-productive and place me closer to despair. Let–it–go surrender, ironically, keeps me in touch with my resolve.

So, Monday, which is Earth Day, I will emerge from my cell and join the ecosystem of the Chemung County Jail, where the women’s voices are loud and defiant. Stingray (not her actual nickname), broke a tooth yesterday. When she showed it to officer Murphy’s Law (that’s his actual nickname) and said, “the other half is in my cell,” Murphy’s Law replied, “So, you think the tooth fairy’s going to come?” And then he left.

But she stood at the iron door and called for pain meds, over and over in a voice that I use for rally speeches. Full oration. Projecting to the rafters. Stingray is six months pregnant.

She got her pain meds.

Stingray is my inspiration. How can I use my time here – separated from the whole human race by the layers of steel and concrete – to speak loudly and defiantly about the business plans of a company called Inergy that seeks to turn my Finger Lakes home into a transportation and storage hub for fossil fuel gases? It is wrong to compress and bury explosive gases in salt caverns beside and beneath a lake – Seneca – that serves as a source of drinking water for 100,000 people. It is wrong to construct a flare stack on the banks of this lake, which will contribute hazardous air pollutants, including death-dealing ozone, into the air. It is wrong for DEC and EPA and FERC to turn a blind eye to a company that has, for the last 12 quarters, exceeded its permitted discharge of chemicals into this lake. It is wrong for a company to claim that basic geological knowledge about the bedrock itself, is a proprietary trade secret and hide it from the public and from the scientific community. It is wrong to deepen our dependency on fossil fuels in a time of climate emergency.

I could express these ideas more eloquently if there were coffee in jail. There is not.

I was led to cell #1 in block D of the Chemung County jail by three things. One is the decision of Inergy to industrialize the Finger Lakes region where I live and, in so doing, aid and abet the fracking industry by erecting a massive storage depot near the birthplace of my son. I consider this an act of desecration. That’s what biologists call the proximate cause of my decision to commit an act of trespass by blockading the Inergy’s compressor station driveway.

The ultimate cause is a commentary published last fall in the journal that all biologists read – Nature – by Jeremy Grantham, who is not a scientist, but an economist. He noted that all the projections for climate change – even the worst case scenarios – were being overtaken by real-life data. In other words, our climate situation is worse than we thought – even when we assumed the worst. Mr. Grantham then exhorted scientists who have this knowledge to be bold – noting that no one is paying attention to this data: “Be persuasive, be bold, be arrested (if necessary).”

So, here I am, ringing the alarm bell from my isolation cell on Earth Day. May my voice be as un-ignorable as Stingray’s.

The third reason is this one: seven years ago, when my son was four years old, he asked to be a polar bear for Halloween, and so I went to work sewing him a costume from a chenille bedspread. It was with the knowledge that the costume would almost certainly outlast the species. Out on the street that night – holding a plastic pumpkin will with KitKat bars – I saw many species heading towards extinction; children dressed as frogs, bees, monarch butterflies, and the icon of Halloween itself – the little brown bat.

The kinship that children feel for animals and their ongoing disappearance from us literally brought me to my knees that night, on a sidewalk in my own village. It was love that got me back up. It was love that brought me to this jail cell.

My children need a world with pollinators and plankton stocks and a stable climate. They need lake shores that do not have explosive hydrocarbon gases buried underneath.

The fossil fuel party must come to an end. I am shouting at an iron door. Can you hear me now?

Here is Dr Steingraber speaking with Bill Moyers after her sentencing, about her decision not to pay the court-ordered fine and serve time in jail instead:

[youtube=http://youtu.be/jgbmlFauH-s]

More links:

From Jail On Earth Day

Sandra Steingraber’s War on Toxic Trespassers

Steingraber, The Abolitionist

Rick Mercer On The Conservative Environmental Plan: Oil Rules

April 29, 2011 by CPP

Although this video is nearly three years old, it is just as true now as it was then. Rick Mercer considers the Harper government’s oil industry approved “environmental” strategy in “Oil Rules”:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gs48KAJ_1pc&NR=1]

What Will It Take For Us To Live Like “There is no Planet B”?

August 13, 2010 by Christine

These stories jumped out at me this week, as clear evidence that we are soon going to “hit the wall” as our consumer-driven, “the economy is what counts, all the rest is noise” ways push our planet to the limit, and beyond. What will it take for us to realize that as our water, air, and land goes, so go we? We aren’t viable if we have to breathe and eat toxins, our lands aren’t arable, and our oceans are so acidified from absorbing our carbon dioxide emissions that mass extinction of marine life happens.

Here are some of the stories that drove this point home to me this week:

Floods, fires, melting ice and feverish heat.

From smoke-choked Moscow to water-soaked Pakistan, a sweltering southern Ontario and the High Arctic, the planet seems to be having a midsummer breakdown. It’s not just a portent of things to come, scientists say, but a sign of troubling climate change already under way.

The weather-related cataclysms of July and August fit patterns predicted by climate scientists, the Geneva-based World Meteorological Organization says — although those scientists always shy from tying individual disasters directly to global warming. The experts now see an urgent need for better ways to forecast extreme events like Russia’s heat wave and wildfires and the record deluge devastating Pakistan. They’ll discuss such tools in meetings this month and next in Europe and America, under United Nations, U.S. and British government sponsorship.

“There is no time to waste,” because societies must be equipped to deal with global warming, says British government climatologist Peter Stott… Read the full article on the Weather 360 blog at The Star.com.

‘Global Weirding’: Extreme Climate Events Dominate The Summer:

A heatwave in Russia is sparking wildfires that are driving residents from Moscow and devastating the country’s wheat crop. A fifth of Pakistan is underwater and millions are deluged by floods in Asia. Another heatwave is torturing Mexico and the East Coast of the United States. An incomprehensibly large chunk of ice has broken off a glacier in Greenland, the most significant climate event there in 50 years.

Most scientists caution that no single event can be tied specifically to increased greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. But climate-change deniers quickly point to the first snowfall in winter as evidence against global warming. If that’s the standard, the extreme climate events all across the globe must say something about whether climate change is already upon us. Indeed, the regularity of the events is beginning to undermine the descriptor “extreme”. Extreme is the new normal…Read the full article on The Huffington Post.

Jersey Shore: Dead Fish Wash Ashore in Thousands For Second Time This Week On East Coast:

NBC Philadelphia reports that tens of thousands of dead menhaden fish washed ashore Wednesday on a New Jersey beach along Delaware Bay.

The incident is strikingly similar to an occurrence from Monday, when thousands of dead menhaden also washed ashore over 200 miles away in Fairhaven, MA…To read the full article, go to The Huffington Post.

And, by Marine toxicologist and Exxon Valdez survivor Rikki Ott: Seafood Safety and Politics Don’t Mix: Opening of Gulf Fisheries At Odds with Evidence of Harm

…I have been in the Gulf since May 3 and have witnessed the outbreak of a public-health epidemic as the oil and dispersant came ashore. Every day now, former workers, Gulf coast residents, and visitors share similar stories with me of respiratory problems, central nervous system problems, chemical sensitivities, or bad skin rashes after exposure to air or water in the Gulf — predictable illnesses from chemical exposure, all of which were avoidable given adequate warning and protection.

Stories of illnesses persist despite assurances from four federal agencies — the Environmental Protection Agency, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, and the U.S. Coast Guard — that no levels of oil or dispersant measured in Gulf water or air were found to be unsafe.

I try to focus on the positive things that each of us can do to make the planet a better, not a worse, place for the next generation, so I apologize if you are feeling overwhelmed or despairing. Each of us can make a difference – but we do need to acknowledge how bad things have gotten so that a sense of urgency accompanies our actions. See Bill McKibbon’s latest post, We’re Hot As Hell and We’re Not Going to Take It Any More. Remember Joe Romm’s words: “Get informed, get outraged, and then get politically active.” If you need ideas, head over to 350.org and sign up to join or organize a work party on 10/10/10 – be part of the global “get to work on climate change” party.

World Religious Leaders: Bold Action Needed On Climate Change

June 23, 2010 by Christine

Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada

Since Monday, dozens of religious leaders from diverse faiths have been gathering at the University of Winnipeg at the G8 Religious Leaders Summit. Besides Christian, Jewish, and Islamic leaders, there are also representatives from Buddhist, Sikh, Hindu, Baha’i, and Shinto traditions as well as Indigenous Spirituality. It is the first time Canada has hosted the Summit which, for the past five years, has been organized to complement the meeting of G8 political leaders. G8 leaders are meeting in Huntsville, Ontario, later this week.

A significant part of each Interfaith Leaders Summit is the writing of a statement, which underscores the nature of the G8 commitments to the Millenium Development Goals and other processes that move toward equality and justic for all children, women and men. The working statement, which is undergoing discussion and will be different at the end of the summit, can be read by clicking on: “A Time For Inspired Leadership and Action“.

I attended the summit yesterday as an observer, and was impressed and encouraged by the sense of importance and urgency that underscored the 1 1/2 hour discussion on climate change. The statement reads, in part:

Climate change has become an urgent and felt manifestation of our collective abuse of the very environment that gives us life. We see the consequences in melting icecaps and rising sea levels, lost habitats for animal and plant species, and erratic weather episodes that threaten the lives of millions of people.

As scientists discover new accelerators of climate change and note the compression of time available to avoid irreparable damage, it is clear that bold action is needed now. We need to move beyond short-term political interests and arguments over who pays. In our indivisible planet we all pay – and future generations will pay dearly – if we continue to delay decisive action now.

Around the table there were calls for courageous and concrete action. Katherine Whitecloud, an aboriginal leader from the Dakota First Nation and a descendant of Chief Sitting Bull, spoke powerful words to the gathered religious leaders. She reminded the room that the rivers are the veins of Mother Earth, and they are now poisoned.

“My grandmother said, someday we will eat our children. That time has come. We are foolishly and arrogantly raping Mother Earth so She has nothing left to offer…Mother Earth is crying, attempting to rid herself of all the toxins we have poured into her [author’s note: it has been extremely wet here on the prairies recently]. You cannot wait for your president, or another elected official, to do something about this. You have to decide what YOU are going to do for your children, for your grandchildren.”

Katherine then went on to ask the assembled group about the meaning of sacrifice, because that is what is going to be needed at this point in human history.

“Sacrifice is going without so someone else will live…Now is the time for courageous and concrete action. In your heart, you know what that means.”

Katherine demonstrated the kind of bold and courageous leadership that we needed to steer through this crisis, and make the dramatic changes necessary so that our children aren’t consumed. What is each of us prepared to do?