Yasuni: time for environmentalists to hold the line
Ecuador’s Yasuní National Park is one of the most biodiverse areas on earth. In one hectare, you’ll find more tree species in Yasuní than exist in the entirety of North America. Naturally, Yasuní also has huge oil reserves buried under it. Under the lush forest, there are estimated to be 846 million barrels of oil (20% of Ecuador’s total reserve), which would take ten years to extract. It’s not just any oil, either. It’s bituminous oil, better known as tar sands, oil that releases 5-15% more carbon dioxide carbon in its extraction and refinement than traditional crude does.
I am (almost) the 1%
On a personal level, it’s hard for me to pin down my feelings about Occupy Wall Street. As the movement has encouraged people to come forward and share stories under the theme “We Are the 99%”, I’ve taken a look at my own circumstances in life. Technically, I am part of the 99%. My family doesn’t rake in millions of dollars a year, I don’t have a trust fund, and I will have to work a real job in the real world to support myself once I get out of college. But that’s where my similarities with most of the 99% end.
The gay conversation
The boys were discussing songs for their band, and Nico mentioned loving some song by John Mayer. His friend agreed, and I shook my head.
“What?” the friend asked me.
“Nothing, he’s just an asshole and a womanizer,” I responded. We discussed this for a little while—they wanted to know how I knew this. Eventually, we agreed that his music was one thing, but as a person, he was probably an asshole.
And then Nico’s friend says, “Well, at least he’s not gay.”
Turtles, time and something like silence
It’s almost one in the morning when I see my first turtle. She’s a leatherback, black and almost six feet long. She moves up the beach in the dark, slowly, as if carrying a great burden. Turning her massive body, back feet now facing us, she begins to dig. There’s sand flying everywhere, and we move to avoid it, trying to be quiet. There are six of us staring at her, but she seems almost oblivious to our presence. She’s focused on the task at hand. With the hole dug, she stands over it and lets her eggs drop in. They come in bursts, slimy and about the size of golf balls, falling into the sand, plopping into the nest she’s made. As she lets them go, tears stream down her face. Locals say that she’s crying at the thought of being separated from her babies. Science says she’s shedding salt from her body. There’s so much gravity in the air, so much at stake that I want to believe she feels what’s going on. In a world where fewer and fewer turtles are able to survive long enough to complete the cycle she’s beginning tonight, her presence here is beautiful, awe-inspiring, a tale of triumph. And yet the odds are stacked against her.
Poverty and food choice
Even controlling for all these factors, buying large quantities of soda is a pretty good predictor of whether someone is on food stamps, at least in my experience. When I first noticed this, it seemed incredibly illogical to me. Buying soda at all made no sense to me, but buying it when you couldn’t afford to feed your family seemed like throwing money away.
I’ve talked about the soda issue with a few friends, and seeing people’s reactions has been really interesting. Several friends of mine (liberal, pro-social welfare people) have expressed shock that soda is covered on food stamps at all. I’ve heard things to the effect of, “If they want to buy that crap, fine, but we shouldn’t be paying for it.” Underlying this belief, I think, is the idea that by excluding soda from food stamps, we can make a statement that we, as a society, don’t believe that this food is good for you, the recipients of social welfare. In short, we will educate the ill-informed poor people about making healthy nutritional choices.
An open letter to my future less-radical self
I want to remind you what you used to be like, before you settled down. The nights you fell asleep thinking that sometimes, you wanted nothing more than to watch Issaquah burn to the ground and see a forest grow back in its place. The evenings you spent plotting guerilla schemes to plant carrots in the middle of golf courses when you had papers you were supposed to be writing. The day you walked through one of the largest coal plants in the country, when you thought about leaving the group to attempt a one-woman sabotage of the computer system, but opted to take two hundred photos of generators and clouds of smoke instead. The weeks and months you searched for a revolutionary who lived up to his legend, who wasn’t just another dictator-to-be waiting to abolish term limits and seize land. Your burning desire to be a journalist, to uncover the worst of humanity, to travel the globe in search of suffering and resilience and speak truth, no matter its costs.
The human construction of nature (aka deep green, part 2)
The human/nature divide is an artificial one. For most of human history, people have lived in “wild” areas, and nature was historically a place where people got food and building materials and tons of other stuff. The idea of setting aside land as “wilderness” would have seemed foreign to most cultures that have existed before ours, and American wilderness was often made by kicking native peoples off of their lands so John Muir and Theodore Roosevelt could enjoy their scenic views of mountains unmolested.
The deep green stuff I’ve read seems to be mostly on board with this, but they draw another divide—industrial civilization versus indigenous cultures. Indigenous cultures are integrated into their landbases and able to live in a sustainable way without depleting natural resources. In contrast, industrial civilization is systematically destroying the planet.
The importance of choice, or, why my negative pregnancy test made me mad at the Republican Party
I was lucky. But it could have gone the other way. I could have been pregnant now or this spring or last year or a dozen other times. I’ve had one or two other minor pregnancy scares, but none of them—not even this one—has been a truly scary experience for me. The reason for that is because I know that where I live, it’s still legal for me (and only me) to decide what I want to do if I do get pregnant.
Intag: development and protest
If you’re a scientist, you might like to know that the Intag Cloud Forest Reserve is home to some of the most spectacular biodiversity on the planet—219 species of birds recorded, more orchid species present than in the entire United States. Even if you’re not science-minded, you’ll appreciate the fact that the Andean tropics contain at least 15% of the entire world’s plant species when you’re walking through the forest or stopping to admire the breathtaking views of rolling hills punctuated by the occasional plot of maize, yucca or banana. Locals in the pueblos surrounding the forest walk for hours to harvest food and visit family members in neighboring towns. The whole area isn’t a postcard for living in harmony with nature—there’s plenty of blaring radio music at all hours of the day and night, not to mention beer and rowdy games of fútbol. But the chaos of daily human life blends almost seamlessly with the natural world, and the area has an undeniable beauty to it, the kind that makes you want to pack up everything you own and buy a one way plane ticket to Ecuador.
Of course, if you’re a mining company, you see Intag in an entirely different way.
Sustainable agricultural development
Over the past two weeks, I’ve read a bunch of articles written by African agricultural experts, and talked to government officials and NGO representatives about the best way to develop Ghana’s agricultural sector.
Most agricultural strategy I’ve come across, both from the Ghanaian government and assorted NGOs, seems to focus on building a more industrial agricultural system. Publications point out that the vast majority of Africa’s farmers are subsistence level (1% of the US population farms, and these farmers grow a surplus of food; meanwhile, 70ish% of Ghanaians farm and the country still imports staples like rice). As far as I can tell, this is seen as a bad thing. Most strategies for agricultural development suggest that the way forward involves larger farms, fewer farmers, more efficient distribution, irrigation, increased fertilizer use and improved seed varieties.
Personal purity isn't political activism
We gathered as a group to discuss the events that had shaped the past half-century in Guatemala. We talked about the horrors and heartbreak that the country had been made to endure, largely at the hands of powerful US interests. After we had been talking for a while, Chris Fontana, our program director shook his head sadly and said to the group, “And all this so we could have cheaper bananas…”
At the time, that statement angered me unspeakably, though I couldn’t quite articulate why. I was angry at the way the United Fruit Company had political connections which allowed them to basically request a coup from the State Department. I was angry at the lack of democratic process inherent in military operations. I was angry at the collusion between corporations and the state. I wanted transparency, accountability, authentic political participation. Chris’s statement seemed to ignore all of these concerns. He reduced the issue down to one of individual choice, of conscious consumerism. His message seemed to be that if US consumers had been paying enough attention, they could have successfully boycotted Chiquita and demanded that the price of bananas reflect their actual cost, which would have magically prevented the coup. We all know that when the interests of power and capital come up against a group of law-abiding citizens making respectful demands, the people always win. Every single time.
What it means to be in love
Environmentalists are always saying they love the earth. I do love the earth—I love hiking and the scenic views of mountains that make my soul breathe a bit easier. But when I get out in forests, I remember that I feel more than just love for the earth. I’m in love with the earth, so completely. My love isn’t the chaste admiration of Emerson or Thoreau. It’s not about writing poetry inspired by majestic sunrises. My love is intimate, physical, wet, wild.
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