Michael Donnelly’s pithy report on counterpunch.org about the 32nd Public Interest Environmental Law Conference, aka E-LAW.
(Courtesy www.counterpunch.org)
“It has never been our job to create solutions to these environmental problems, and we were never very good at it anyway. Why, in 1986 I spent four months in jail for demanding scrubbers for coal fired power plants, the very scrubbers responsible for these mountains of coal ash all over the place. There are plenty of people who want to propose alternatives, but most of them simply want to preserve the level of comfort they now enjoy. The environmental movement has lost its voice in this crowd. Boldness has vanished, truth is hidden and we seem to be moving about like ducks in a pen when a hawk flies over. The only possible solutions, and we all know this, involve sacrifice. That is a hard sell, but then again we are not merchants”
— Mike Roselle, Climate Ground Zero
Kim and I rode our bikes in the rain over to the Student Union building; locked them along with the hundreds of other bikes clogging the racks. We went to the stairway to the Ballroom where the Keynote Speaker presentation was about to happen. We were intercepted and told we had to check our packs to gain entry. I wanted to get some photos, so we balked. Kim knew the back stairs and elevator entrances to the second floor ballroom, so we checked them out as a way to gain entry with my camera. At every door, stair and elevator, there were “No Entry” signs and a guard. Outside on the rooftop, there were guards; as if someone was going to rappel down to the balcony and crash through the windows a la Bruce Willis.
Who was I hoping to photograph speaking? Henry Kissinger? Angelina Jolie? No, it was Lierre Keith of the group Deep Green Resistance (DGR) who was about to speak. Her appearance was being hotly protested by a loose-knit group of green transsexuals and their supporters who set up a wet vigil outside. The cult-like DGR has been relentless in denouncing male-to-female trans women. DGR claims to be “Radical Feminists” and that Genitalia is Destiny – that being born with a penis somehow locks one in the Man Box and men just can’t help themselves from being dicks – a bit of misandry insulting to all men. But that’s their reasoning behind their exclusionary view that male-to-female women just aren’t welcome in activist circles. While I don’t want to give this bizarre distraction much more energy, both sides’ arguments can be seen here: and, here.
The setting is the 32nd Public Interest Environmental Law Conference, commonly known as E-LAW. This year’s conference – themed “Running into Running Out” – got off to this surreal start and just kept getting weirder given our existential crisis and the fact that this, the first such conference, started as a place where grassroots activists rubbed up with policy wonks, attorneys, laws students, scientists, bureaucrats…to examine the state of the planet and what was being done about it and who as doing it. Of course, a major part of it was/is always employment opportunities for graduating baby lawyers.
As portrayed in John Sayles short story The Anarchists’ Convention, it’s a truism that if you assemble a lot of activists; activism – often silly – will occur. That still happens at E-LAW, but on a far more minor scale. Some of what passed for this year’s actions were decidedly lame – like the ossified non-profit Oregon Wild (Mild) organizing a forty-person march to the Eugene branch offices of Rep. Peter DeFazio and Sens. Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley – all (D-Big Timber) – to protest their recent Bills that greatly expand logging on Public lands in Oregon under the rubric of using chainsaws to remove Biomass and that somehow will bring the forests to better “health.” These are the very same offices where Oregon Mild first met with the same phony “progressive” career politicians to sell the concept of “Restoration Forestry” – THE “Forest Health” justification for the timber plans the same “activists,” err, paid staffers now oppose. The politicians were thousands of miles away, a la Obama during 350.org’s mortifying invite-only White House Feb. 2013 “our Lunch Counter Moment” vanity protest. (The main protest activism was Anti-Nuclear this year. I’ll get into that later.)
The Consumption Elephant, err, Mammoth in the Room
Let’s get back to this year’s theme: “Running into Running Out.” Perhaps the first clue that this wasn’t going to lead to what I thought it would was that the hourglass used as logo with the theme was upside-down – 95% of the sand was still in the top chamber.
I perused the agenda for panels and Keynote addresses on just what strategies and sacrifices we were going to have to commit to in order to effectively address that “Running Out.” Out of 138 panels, just one was on Population and Consumption – the underlying cause of it all: “Advocacy in the Anthropocene: How to Talk about Population to Save the Environment.” The excellent presentation was organized by the Center for Biological Diversity’s (CBD) Population and Sustainability wing. And, there is no denying just how needed their population program is, especially when the other big greens studiously avoid this elephant. CBD has given away over 500,000 condoms tying it directly to species conservation, using info on the packaging to sell the link. Alan Weisman, author of the fine thought experiment book “The World without Us” was on the panel. His new book “Countdown” examines population reduction efforts around the world. (The shocker? Iran has achieved a birth rate lower than replacement…due to religious edicts, however.) Stephanie Feldstein, CBD’s Population and Sustainability Director, took on Consumption, noting that if all 7.2 billion Clever Apes lived the same life-style as the typical North American, we’d need 4.5 Earth’s worth of resources.
{Though the organization has many very good people doing very worthy work like this, I have never been a fan of CBD, ever since they were one of the collaborating groups behind the flawed Restoration/Forest Health model and how they demeaned others (yes, myself included) who opposed the concept from the beginning. I also take issue with CBD’s non-democratic/no voting membership closely-held corporate organizational model. While PIELC prefers that nomenclature over E-LAW, CBD staffers hubristically self-reference as “The Center.”}
One panel was on “Federal Forest Litigation in the Context of Collaboration” and another one was “New Science on Fire, Water and Forests” which looked into how the actual results of Collaborative Restoration Forestry’s chainsaw surgery does far more harm than good for forest ecosystems. As with Oregon Wild, no groundswell of grassroots membership ever directed any of these groups to “collaborate” with industrial forestry on yet another excuse for stump-creation. That directive came directly from their funders and Democrat Party allies. That hoodwinked CBD, like duped Oregon Wild, is also now opposing huge Southwest timber sales that the Forest Service claims are based on Restoration precepts bodes well. (Though it does remind me of when the 1940s Vichy French “collaborators” whined when the Nazis arrested 11 of their top leaders AFTER said leaders had “collaborated” and sent 65,000 Jews to Germany.)
Anything at all, but Sacrifice
I heard a lot over the weekend on what’s wrong. Yet, every “solution” I heard proposed all weekend was as bad, or worse, as the one I heard before it. Trees converted to jet fuel!!; Nukes, small-scale Nukes, Carbon fees and dividends, Sabotage, Forest Health/Restoration logging “collaborations,” Cascadian Secession, Socially Responsible Investing, all sorts of minor policy tweaks, “We the People against Corporate Personhood,” multiple panels on “Crushing Patriarchy” “Misogyny & Ecocide,” Revolution,…it was surreal. Cascadian Secession was the sole pipedream “solution” I could get behind, though there may be hope for yet another Teamsters and Turtles coalition with labor.
Yet, there was nothing at all about sacrifice…about drastic reductions in consumption. NOTHING!
Also conspicuously missing were presentations on the on-going poisoning of Appalachia for coal, though Appalachian-based Mountain Justice did have an info table amongst the hallways lined with group presentations. Being the West Coast, coal issues addressed were about mining coal in Wyoming and sending it overseas to China and other nations via rail and barge hauling to export docks; and the shipping and building of such dock facilities were focused on.
Mike Roselle of Climate Ground Zero was supposed to come and get recognition for CGZ. But, Mike was scheduled to be arraigned in West “by coal” Virginia on the 3rd for his Thanksgiving Day taking of a sealed jar of toxic coal-blasting dust to the Governor and demanding it be tested. He was arrested and jailed for it and awaits trial; which is being pushed back, understandably, by the authorities given the unending toxic news from WV of late.
Deadly Energy
Of course, the main indicators that we are “Running Out” of time is Carbon Pollution and resultant Climate Chaos and Extinctions. So, also of course, one would expect that that and strategies on how to combat it would be THE major focus of the conference and indeed a large presence was climate scientist Dr. James Hansen, who appeared on various panels and gave a Keynote address.
I arrived early for his first panel “Merging Climate Science with the Law and Communication” figuring it’d be packed. It was. Anti-nuke activists were handing out info at the doors on Hansen’s pro-Nukes position.
A very good reporter for the good local Eugene Weekly asked what she should ask Hansen a few days ago before he arrived. I asked her in the hall before the panel if she had asked my question “what is your personal carbon footprint and where does it come from?”
In a great irony, after flying into Beijing, Hansen was hospitalized in China two days before flying to PIELC due to foul air quality and couldn’t respond to any of her list of questions!
Hansen delved into the science and then trotted out a cockamamie “solution” he and fellow scientists (and funders, no doubt) concocted. It would have a Carbon Fee collected on carbon at its source. Some sort of new bureaucracy would be set up to collect the fees and instead of the fees going into the Federal Treasury; they would then be redistributed as Dividends to consumers. This preposterously unworkable idea then purports to be the driver behind lowering carbon use and pollution; so much so that the increase in planetary temperature would be then kept below 1.5 degrees Centigrade before 2080, instead of a more disastrous 2 degrees or more.
It wasn’t long before the crowd got dazed and confused by that line of thought and someone brought up Nukes. Hansen responded with “No one has ever died from a nuclear accident.”
“That’s not true” rang out from the crowd and it was on. The rest of the time was a debate on the merits of Nukes. Hansen noted that “one million people die from coal in China every year.” Others countered with deaths from radiation.
As soon as the panel ended, a group of his questioners approached Hansen and started in on the topic. I went up to get a photo. As I snapped the shot, Hansen told the stunned group, ”More people have died installing solar panels on roofs than have died in nuclear accidents.”
One wag said, “I’ve said it all along; this is the epicenter of Greenwashing in North America this weekend.”
Dr. James Hansen tells a group of mind-blown anti-Nukes activists, “More people have died installing solar panels on roofs than have died in nuclear accidents.” That’s Oregon hero Lloyd Marbet in the plaid shirt. And, Chuck Johnson is next to him. They doggedly/successfully fought for the end of the Trojan Nuke Plant.
False Solutions squared
Mind blown myself, I rode off to another part of campus to attend a panel with a title right up my alley: “False Solutions: The Flaws of Green Energy.” Two guys from something called the Fertile Ground Environmental Institute had the facts down as to how “Renewable” Energy is really reconstituted fossil fuel and , thus, more inefficient than just burning the fossil fuel for electrons in the first place. They examined the vast amounts of coal that go into making solar panels, wind towers, steel, cement, etc. They had photos of massive mines, including the huge Rare Earth metals mine in China that provides batteries/magnets for 80% of our iPhones, iPads, wind power generators, Pius batteries, etc. – the basis for this form of industrial energy. They claimed that 1.2 million Tibetans have died in the forced labor (slavery) of the mines – 20% of all Tibetans alive! (Yes. I’m checking into that.)
I’ve been waiting for a solid analysis of “Renewable Energy” and this was the first time I’ve seen such a panel discussion on it at a green event. Even with massive subsidies to wind and solar, these provide fewer than 2% of overall power in the US grid and even that is unusable without base-load steam-generated power – coal, nukes, Biomass or natural gas. What really passes for “renewable” under the odious “25 x 25 renewable portfolio” plans adopted by most states is Biomass – the burning of trees for electrons. Getting those trees to the steam plants is the real underlying purpose of the many new logging plans that Oregon Wild and others now oppose.
As my buddy Jeff notes, “And since 90% of “clean energy” is the biomassacre, every time I hear someone want to deal with “climate” I hear the march of the bio-suicides: Bio-char, bio-mass, bio-fuel. Therefore, I despair every time I hear anyone talking about climate, because I see it as a symbol of the environmental movement, if there ever really was one, having lost its mind, and its way, and only being comfortable with nothing that will make any difference at all, as intended.
Right now from Michigan to Vermont to Wisconsin to California THAT is the suicide of the planet being most ramped up, and despite the lies of those pushing renewable energy, is going to double, triple, ten times more as we promote “getting off fossil fuels” to save the climate; thereby assassinating nature in the name of green.
So for me, when I hear “climate” concern, I hear the trees and orangutans and tigers and wolves and life I love being slaughtered even faster. The planet and the climate are being destroyed even faster in the name of preventing climate change.”
Sabotage, then what?
Well, the False Solutions panel devolved quickly enough. Admitting their ties to DGR, the panelists then trotted out their “solution.” It was Sabotage! Take down the grid! They praised efforts that have damaged the grid and other energy supply routes. No talk at all of how, if that succeeded, then what? As the Population and Consumption panel noted; 60% of our food is grown with natural gas-derived fertilizers, it’s delivered via fossil fuels…cutting off fossil fuels cold turkey means genocide. The great irony of Industrial Civilization is that we cannot live much longer with it and billions cannot/will not live without it.
Best Things about PIELC
There has always been a commitment to Indigenous Peoples at E-LAW. The UofO Student Longhouse is right behind the Law School and a full slate of activities happen there during the conference. In addition to the annual honoring of elders; this year, most of it was about the 1000 Yellowstone Buffalo that are being killed right now – over 300 already down.
Native people from around the world always are given Keynote slots to present their plight. E-LAW sets out how to interact with Native people, especially revered elders, in the brochure. The event is quite multi-cultural. I see more people in traditional clothing than I see all year combined.
Ecological Social Justice is always on the agenda.
Upon registration, people are asked about how they traveled to the conference in an attempt to calculate the event’s carbon footprint. Paper coffee cups are banned.
Activists attend for free. Lawyers pay a fee.
Gender balance on panels is a goal.
Best Things this Year
The top event for me was the honoring of my friend, the great activist attorney Lauren Regan and her superb, skilled group – the Civil Liberties Defense Center on CLDC’s Tenth Anniversary. In those ten years, CLDC has represented 900 activists of all causes, though mainly Native and Eco-activists, for free. Lauren and her allies are indispensible to the movements. CLDC is my top activist group…they are my “The Center!”
Regan is also part of a new effort – the Global Climate Convergence, which is another Teamsters and Turtles attempt to ally Greens and Labor in conservation and social justice efforts. She, 2012 Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein, sociologist Dr. Jamil Jonna and labor organizer Richard Monje made several presentations on GCC. After the Teamsters and Turtles experience, no one could blame Eco-activists for being shy about any new such efforts – it foundered when the “Teamsters” felt the need to cut the trees for jobs when the “Turtles” sought to protect them for habitat.
This time I have some hope. Monje isn’t some Pollyanna and Regan and Jonna certainly are not; and Stein impresses me more and more. Monje knows full well the tough sell on either end. He’s a veteran of the bi-lingual education efforts and citizen safety campaigns in his native East LA neighborhood. He was shot by the police at an anti-Vietnam War protest. As someone who grew up in Flint, MI and joined the UAW and worked for GM starting at age 18 and who later worked in NW lumber mills before becoming a forest protection advocate, this effort strikes close to home with me.
Regan gave a lunch Keynote and noted Population and Consumption as a root cause of every issue being addressed at the conference. And, then at the end of Saturday, after Hansen gave a stodgy Keynote address, Prof. Mary Wood of the Law School, followed and gave the long-awaited speech that finally seriously addressed Consumption.
Another, more inclusive group organized a Trans and Womyn’s Action Camp and made a presentation at the conference about it.
Dancing on the Ruins of Industrial Civilization
Speaking of Industrial Civilization, the annual Earth First! OutLAW Party was held in a run-down warehouse district, outdoors, in the rain amongst a vast array of the debris of industry. The bands were quite good this year. The rain never stopped. Mud and cracked cement was the dance floor. The traditional effigy burn went well and even the ten-person naked pyramid next to the fire held up…the big guys on the bottom getting only a little muddy.
But as I looked around the 250-person crowd, I saw but a couple dozen of the “old guard.” It was a passing of the torch, so to speak, event this year, as long-time EF! pyro master Mick Garvin is recovering from yet another eye operation and wasn’t in attendance.
Mick recently came up with a proposal to hold an Earth First! Rendezvous in an abandoned Detroit factory and actually dance on said ruins (and to lend support to the many young urban pioneers now resettling Detroit.)
As David Brower used to say, the real action at these events takes place in the halls and bars and any effective actions that come out of it are concocted there – the camaraderie is one of the best, if not the best, part of it.
Where DO We Go from Here?
One activist declared that despite all the distractions and buffoonery, “at least they are talking about the Climate Crisis.” It’s a start.
As Mike Roselle points out, we aren’t merchants and our job is not to sell windmills (or Nukes, rare earth-derived solar panels or “Forest Health” logging schemes)…it is to lower our planet-destroying habits – to Power Down this Industrial experiment and People Down before it’s too late. Our job is to resist extinctions caused by 7.2 billion Clever Apes consuming the life support system. It’s how to provide for Gaia to carry on with Her full complement of species. It’s how to humanely get the population of us primates down to a number that begins with an “M,” not a “B,” so that those other species – and ultimately we – can thrive in harmony with this beautiful, magical planet we are blessed to occupy.
THIS is what Running into Running Out really means. We may already be beyond the critical tipping points. 600 species went extinct over the course of the conference! Ignoring consumption and focusing on techno-policy tweaks around the edges and an array of false “solutions” may well provide full employment for Eco-attorneys and Eco-collaborators…but not for long.
MICHAEL DONNELLY has attended 30 E-LAW Conferences. He has presented panels on activism and forest protection over the years. He was Plaintiff in the first successful Old Growth lawsuit. He can be reached at Pahtoo@aol.com
Courtesy www.counterpunch.org
