Occupy Earth: Nature Is the 99%, Too

Published on Thursday, October 27, 2011 by TomDispatch.com

Occupy Earth: Nature Is the 99%, Too

Someone Got Rich and Someone Got Sick

by Chip Ward

What if rising sea levels are yet another measure of inequality? What if the degradation of our planet’s life-support systems -- its atmosphere, oceans, and biosphere -- goes hand in hand with the accumulation of wealth, power, and control by that corrupt and greedy 1% we are hearing about from Zuccotti Park? What if the assault on America’s middle class and the assault on the environment are one and the same?

Money Rules: It’s not hard for me to understand how environmental quality and economic inequality came to be joined at the hip. In all my years as a grassroots organizer dealing with the tragic impact of degraded environments on public health, it was always the same: someone got rich and someone got sick.photo: 350.org

In the struggles that I was involved in to curb polluters and safeguard public health, those who wanted curbs, accountability, and precautions were always outspent several times over by those who wanted no restrictions on their effluents. We dug into our own pockets for postage money, they had expense accounts. We made flyers to slip under the windshield wipers of parked cars, they bought ads on television. We took time off from jobs to visit legislators, only to discover that they had gone to lunch with fulltime lobbyists.

Naturally, the barons of the chemical and nuclear industries don’t live next to the radioactive or toxic-waste dumps that their corporations create; on the other hand, impoverished black and brown people often do live near such ecological sacrifice zones because they can’t afford better. Similarly, the gated communities of the hyper-wealthy are not built next to cesspool rivers or skylines filled with fuming smokestacks, but the slums of the planet are. Don’t think, though, that it’s just a matter of property values or scenery. It’s about health, about whether your kids have lead or dioxins running through their veins. It’s a simple formula, in fact: wealth disparities become health disparities.

And here’s another formula: when there’s money to be made, both workers and the environment are expendable. Just as jobs migrate if labor can be had cheaper overseas, I know workers who were tossed aside when they became ill from the foul air or poisonous chemicals they encountered on the job.

The fact is: we won’t free ourselves from a dysfunctional and unfair economic order until we begin to see ourselves as communities, not commodities. That is one clear message from Zuccotti Park.

Polluters routinely walk away from the ground they poison and expect taxpayers to clean up after them. By “externalizing” such costs, profits are increased. Examples of land abuse and abandonment are too legion to list, but most of us can refer to a familiar “superfund site” in our own backyard. Clearly, Mother Nature is among the disenfranchised, exploited, and struggling.

Democracy 101: The 99% pay for wealth disparity with lost jobs, foreclosed homes, weakening pensions, and slashed services, but Nature pays, too. In the world the one-percenters have created, the needs of whole ecosystems are as easy to disregard as, say, the need the young have for debt-free educations and meaningful jobs.

Extreme disparity and deep inequality generate a double standard with profound consequences. If you are a CEO who skims millions of dollars off other people’s labor, it’s called a “bonus.” If you are a flood victim who breaks into a sporting goods store to grab a lifejacket, it’s called looting. If you lose your job and fall behind on your mortgage, you get evicted. If you are a banker-broker who designed flawed mortgages that caused a million people to lose their homes, you get a second-home vacation-mansion near a golf course.

If you drag heavy fishnets across the ocean floor and pulverize an entire ecosystem, ending thousands of years of dynamic evolution and depriving future generations of a healthy ocean, it’s called free enterprise. But if, like Tim DeChristopher, you disrupt an auction of public land to oil and gas companies, it’s called a crime and you get two years in jail.

In campaigns to make polluting corporations accountable, my Utah neighbors and I learned this simple truth: decisions about what to allow into the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the food we eat are soon enough translated into flesh and blood, bone and nerve, and daily experience. So it’s crucial that those decisions, involving environmental quality and public health, are made openly, inclusively, and accountably. That’s Democracy 101.

The corporations that shred habitat and contaminate your air and water are anything but democratic. Stand in line to get your 30 seconds in front of a microphone at a public hearing about the siting of a nuclear power plant, the effluent from a factory farm, or the removal of a mountaintop and you’ll get the picture quickly enough: the corporations that profit from such ecological destruction are distant, arrogant, secretive, and unresponsive. The 1% are willing to spend billions impeding democratic initiatives, which is why every so-called environmental issue is also about building a democratic culture.

First Kill the EPA, Then Social Security: Beyond all the rhetoric about freedom from the new stars of the Republican Party, the strategy is simple enough: obstruct and misinform, then blame the resulting dysfunction on “government.” It’s a great scam. Tell the voters that government doesn’t work and then, when elected, prove it. And first on the list of government outfits they want to sideline or kill is the Environmental Protection Agency, so they can do away with the already flimsy wall of regulation that stands between their toxins and your bloodstream.

Poll after poll shows that citizens understand the need for environmental rules and safeguards. Mercury is never put into the bloodstreams of nursing mothers by consensus, nor are watersheds fracked until they are flammable by popular demand. But the free market ideologues of the Republican Party are united in opposition to any rule or standard that impedes the “magic” of the marketplace and unchecked capital.

The same bottom-line quarterly-report fixation on profitability that accepts oil spills as inevitable also accepts unemployment as inevitable. Tearing apart wildlife habitat to make a profit and doing the same at a workplace are just considered the price of doing business. Clearcutting a forest and clearcutting a labor force are two sides of the same coin.

Beware of Growth: Getting the economy growing has been the refrain of the Obama administration and the justification for every bad deal, budget cut, and unbalanced compromise it’s made. The desperate effort to grow the economy to solve our economic woes is what keeps Timothy Geithner at the helm of the Treasury and is what stalls the regulation of greenhouse gasses. It’s why we are told we must sacrifice environmental quality for pipelines and why young men and women are sacrificed to protect access to oil, the lubricant for an acquisitive economic engine. The financial empire of the one percenters and the political order it has shaped are predicated on easy and relentless growth. How, we are asked, will there be enough for everyone if we don’t keep growing?

The fundamental contradiction of our time is this: we have built an all-encompassing economic engine that requires unending growth. A contraction of even a percent or two is a crisis, and yet we are embedded in ecosystems that are reaching or have reached their limits. This isn’t complicated: There’s only so much fertile soil or fresh water available, only so many fish in the ocean, only so much CO² the planet can absorb and remain habitable.

Yes, you can get around this contradiction for a while by exploiting your neighbor’s habitat, using technological advances to extend your natural resources, and stealing from the future -- that is, using up soil, minerals, and water your grandchildren (someday to be part of that same 99%) will need. But the limits to those familiar and, in the past, largely successful strategies are becoming more evident all the time.

At some point, we’ll discover that you can’t exist for long beyond the boundaries of the natural world, that (as with every other species) if you overload the carrying capacity of your habitat, you crash. Warming temperatures, chaotic weather patterns, extreme storms, monster wildfires, epic droughts, Biblical floods, an avalanche of species extinction… that collapse is upon us now. In the human realm, it translates into hunger and violence, mass migrations and civil strife, failed states and resource wars.

Like so much else these days, the crash, as it happens, will not be suffered in equal measure by all of us. The one percenters will be atop the hill, while the 99% will be in the flood lands below swimming for their lives, clinging to debris, or drowning. The Great Recession has previewed just how that will work.

An unsustainable economy is inherently unfair, and worse is to come. After all, the car is heading for the cliff’s edge, the grandkids are in the backseat, and all we’re arguing about is who can best put the pedal to the metal.

Occupy Earth: Give credit where it’s due: it’s been the genius of the protesters in Zuccotti Park to shift public discourse to whether the distribution of economic burdens and rewards is just and whether the economic system makes us whole or reduces and divides us. It’s hard to imagine how we’ll address our converging ecological crises without first addressing the way accumulating wealth and power has captured the political system. As long as Washington is dominated and intimidated by giant oil companies, Wall Street speculators, and corporations that can buy influence and even write the rules that make buying influence possible, there’s no meaningful way to deal with our economy’s addiction to fossil fuels and its dire consequences.

Nature’s 99% is an amazingly diverse community of species. They feed and share and recycle within a web of relationships so dynamic and complex that we have yet to fathom how it all fits together. What we have excelled at so far is breaking things down into their parts and then reassembling them; that, after all, is how a barrel of crude oil becomes rocket fuel or a lawn chair.

When it comes to the more chaotic, less linear features of life like climate, ecosystems, immune systems, or fetal development, we are only beginning to understand thresholds and feedback loops, the way the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts. But we at least know that the parts matter deeply and that, before we even fully understand them, we’re losing them at an accelerating rate. Forests are dying, fisheries are going, extinction is on steroids.

Degrading the planet’s operating systems to bolster the bottom line is foolish and reckless. It hurts us all. No less important, it’s unfair. The 1% profit, while the rest of us cough and cope.

After Occupy Wall Street, isn’t it time for Occupy Earth?

Copyright 2011 Chip Ward

Chip Ward is a former grassroots organizer/activist who has led several successful campaigns to hold polluters accountable. He co-founded and led Families Against Incinerator Risk and HEAL Utah. He described his political adventures in Canaries on the Rim: Living Downwind in the West and Hope's Horizon: Three Visions for Healing the American Land. Today he works to protect the spectacular redrock wildlands of Utah. His essays can be found by clicking here.

100,000 excess deaths in North America in 2011 from Fukushima

examiner.com

Leuren Moret: 100,000 excess deaths in North America in 2011 from Fukushima

Alfred Lambremont Webre

Seattle Exopolitics Examiner

October 22, 2011

By Alfred Lambremont Webre, JD. MEd

In an exclusive ExopoliticsTV interview released Oct. 22, 2011 independent scientist Leuren Moret, MA, PhD ABT has revealed that approximately 100,000 excess deaths will occur in North America 2011 that are directly attributable to the effects of deadly radiation from the March 11, 2011 tectonic-nuclear false flag earthquake and tsunami event at Fukushima, Japan.

Ms. Moret's relevation of 100,000 excess deaths in 2011 in North America from Fukushima radiation is based on official excess death data for 2011 published by the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention), set out at the end of this article.

According to Ms. Moret, the governments of the USA, Canada, Japan and other governments are in knowing complicity in a cover-up of this documented radiation genocide and crimes against humanity by a now-identified international war crimes racketeering organization.

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Based on Ms. Moret’s and other’s research, [See list of links at end of this article], forensic evidence now confirms that the March 11, 2011 Fukushima tectonic-radiation event was triggered by the HAARP-Chemtrails weapons system.

In the case of the Fukushima event, the HAARP Facility at Tromso, Norway may have been the HAARP of more that 17 HAARP facilities worldwide controlled by an international war crimes racketeering organization overseeing HAARP used to trigger the March 11, 2011 Fukushima event. The over-all purpose of this false flag global radiation event was as part of a global depopulation plan to reduce the human population by 90% or more by some reports.

Watch ExopoliticsTV interview with independent scientist Leuren Moret

Readers can watch the ExopoliticsTV interview with independent scientist Leuren Moret embedded in the article above or at the URL below:

WATCH INTERVIEW:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_mudMjxSaZA

“100,000 North American excess deaths is an underestimate”

Leuren Moret states, “100,000 excess deaths in North America in 2011 from Fukushima is an underestimate because that does not include deaths of infants and preborns attributable to Fukushima radiation.”

Ms. Moret continues, “The 100,000 excess deaths is 2011 from Fukushima radiation is just for the USA alone. That figure does not include excess deaths from Fukushima radiation in Canada and in Mexico. Now bigger numbers of excess deaths due to Fukushima radiation are coming out for Toronto, Canada than here in the USA.”

Ms. Moret states, “The death rate for infant mortality has increased by 50% in the North West United States since March 11, 2011, as of June 18, 2011. The death rate for infant mortality has to be higher since June 18 because the radiation levels and excess deaths are increasing every week. We will have a horrific update in December 2011, because the increase in birth defects is going to be very apparent in December 2011, - 9 months after Fukushima.”

Fukushima: Environmental radiation levels in USA and Japan and increases in death rates

In her ExopoliticsTV interview, independent scientist Leuren Moret assesses excess deaths for the USA, update for March 13 – September 3, 2011, citing “Beta Radiation In the United States Following the Fukushima Disaster”

Ms. Moret states, “A report on beta levels in the US has established the background levels from 2010, in order to assess and monitor the increases in environmental accumulated Fukushima radiation throughout 129 US cities using EPA data since March 11, 2011. For each time period the beta level increased by many times the 2010 level for the same time period:

“March 15-31 5.09X background (2010)
April 1-30 2.01X background
May 1-23 1.15X background”

Ms. Moret continues, “The March multiplier effects were the highest reported through May, also very high in some cities, with significant increases in all cities tested:

“Tucson AZ Radiation is 18.20X times higher than 2010
Eureka CA Radiation is 53.05X times higher than 2010
San Diego CA Radiation is 11.42X times higher than 2010
Honolulu HI Radiation is 23.98X times higher than 2010
Hilo HI Radiation is 12.49X times higher than 2010
Salt Lake City UT Radiation is 16.77X times higher than 2010”

Ms. Moret notes, “The top beta increases in 15 cities were Phoenix, Salt Lake City, Tucson, San Diego, Honolulu, Riverside, Orlando, Hilo, Las Vegas, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Omaha, Sacramento, Jacksonville FL, Idaho Falls. March 15-31 rainfall was 8” in Eureka CA, 3.80” in LA, 4.10” in Sacramento, 4.72” in San Francisco, 4.02” in Orlando FL, 6.53” in Hilo, 3.38” in Portland, and 3.58” in Olympia WA. There were also differences in the amount of dry deposition (AZ, UT, CA, HI, FL) in some states compared to wet deposition (CA, HI, FL, WA, OR).”

Seafood and radiation

In her ExopoliticsTV interview, Ms. Moret notes that, “According to CNN Radioactive beef has leaked into the consumer market over in Japan. I can only see this spreading to other Countries through the oceans. If you remember just recently the US Gov. said that it is going to stop monitoring the fish for radiation. So much for the Seafood lovers.”

Radiation and infant mortality rates

In her interview Ms. Moret states, “This data regarding excess deaths does not include infant mortality. However, as reported in late June by Dr. Janette Sherman, infant mortality rates in west coast cities from Washington to California, increased 35% between March 11 and June 18, and in the Pacific Northwest where there is higher rainfall, infant mortality increased 45% in Vancouver, Seattle, Portland, and Spokane. The increase in excess deaths in the general population would be expected to be lower than for infant mortality, because infants are the most susceptible to radiation exposure even at very low levels.”

Radiation and excess death rates

References:

US Regions with Significant Increases in Mortality Since 3/13/11 (CDC)
http:/freepdfhosting.com/2b6c39b50b.pdf

CDC weekly update: http://wonder.cdc.gov/mmwr/mmwr_reps.asp

Total excess US deaths 03/13/11-09/03/11: 34,129
Weekly increase range – 2.7% to 9.1% (7/9/11-9/3/11)
Pacific Region: WA, OR, CA, AK, HI
Weekly increase: +3.6%, 3.4%3.6%, 3.6%, 3.6%, 3.3%, 3.5% = 6,716 excess deaths
West South Central: OK, AR, LA, and TX
Weekly increase – +5.2%, 5.9%, 7.0%, 7.0% 6.6%, 6.9%, 4.9%= 8,730 excess deaths

Total US Excess Deaths 03/13/11-09/03/11 = 34,129 excess deaths 25 weeks
Peak excess death rate period April 23-May 21 (May 7 peak 34% increase)

March 11, 2011 – Sept 3 34,000 in 25 wks.

Jan 1, 2012 excess deaths including infant - 100,000 excess deaths.

Radiation and maternal death rates

Maternal Deaths – “Maternal Deaths: Why the Rise?”
http://www.medicalobserver.com.au/news/maternal-deaths-why-the-rise

Australia – 8.4 deaths per 100,000
Herzegovina/Bosnia/Macedonia/Croatia – 10 or fewer per 100,000
Calif. 2005 maternal mortality 11 per 100,000
California 1996-2006 maternal mortality tripled from 5.6 to 16.9 per 100,000
Causes: morbid obesity, ageing mothers, hypertension, diabetes, hemorrhaging from caesarian sections (especially in obese mothers)
AU: obesity in pregnant women has increased from 30/yr. in 2008 from 1-2 in 2003
AU/US: C-sections highest in world – 2007 had 30.9% births were C-section
AU: Gestational diabetes increased 20% 2001-2006
Conjoined twins – increasing in monsoon rainout of DU areas (human/animal)
Sex ratios at birth – boys/100 girls changing in radiation contaminated areas
UN and WHO hiding this statistic more than any others

Fukushima - References

33. Leuren Moret: Japan, U.S., Canadian governments complicit in radiation cover-up

http://www.examiner.com/exopolitics-in-seattle/leuren-moret-japan-u-s-canadian-governments-complicit-radiation-cover-up

32. YOU TUBE: Leuren Moret: Japan, U.S., Canadian governments complicit in radiation cover-up

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nb49kkkkYps

31. YOUTUBE - Leuren Moret: Nuclear genocide of babies & children in Japan, U.S., Canada grows

http://youtu.be/Z91frvrhris

30. RADIATION UPDATE - Leuren Moret: Nuclear genocide of babies & children in Japan, U.S., Canada grows

http://www.examiner.com/exopolitics-in-seattle/leuren-moret-nuclear-genocide-of-babies-children-japan-u-s-canada-grows

29. VIDEO - Leuren Moret: Nuclear genocide of babies & children in Japan, U.S., Canada grows

http://www.examiner.com/exopolitics-in-seattle/leuren-moret-nuclear-genocide-of-babies-and-children-japan-us-canada-grows-video

28. YOUTUBE: Leuren Moret - Fukushima radiation food contamination grows in Japan, U.S., Canada - Part 2 of 3

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DV7Tm7Tjh9I

27. RADIATION UPDATE - Leuren Moret: Fukushima radiation food contamination grows in Japan, US, Canada

http://www.examiner.com/exopolitics-in-seattle/leuren-moret-fukushima-radiation-food-contamination-grows-japan-us-canada

26. VIDEO: Leuren Moret - Fukushima radiation food contamination grows in Japan, U.S., Canada

http://www.examiner.com/exopolitics-in-seattle/leuren-moret-fukushima-radiation-food-contamination-grows-japan-u-s-canada-part-2-of-3-video

25. Leuren Moret: Mega-tsunami, total melt-through, radiation levels and illnesses

http://www.examiner.com/exopolitics-in-seattle/leuren-moret-mega-tsunami-total-melt-through-radiation-levels-and-illnesses

24. VIDEO: Leuren Moret: Mega-tsunami, total melt-through, radiation levels and illnesses

http://www.examiner.com/exopolitics-in-seattle/leuren-moret-mega-tsunami-total-melt-through-radiation-levels-and-illnesses-video

23. YOUTUBE: Leuren Moret: Mega-tsunami, total melt-through, radiation levels and illnesses

http://youtu.be/6L3BHnI1A_Y

22.Leuren Moret: Fukushima HAARP nuclear attack by CIA, DOE, BP for London banks

http://www.examiner.com/exopolitics-in-seattle/leuren-moret-fukushima-haarp-nuclear-attack-by-cia-doe-bp-for-london-banks

21. VIDEO: Leuren Moret - Fukushima HAARP nuclear attack by CIA, DOE, BP for London banks

http://www.examiner.com/exopolitics-in-seattle/leuren-moret-fukushima-haarp-nuclear-attack-by-cia-doe-bp-for-london-banks-video

20. YOU TUBE - Leuren Moret: Fukushima HAARP nuclear attack by CIA, DOE, BP for London banks

http://youtu.be/htsWup50i3E

19. Leuren Moret: Fukushima tectonic nuclear warfare monitored by world partners

http://www.examiner.com/exopolitics-in-seattle/leuren-moret-fukushima-tectonic-nuclear-warfare-monitored-by-world-partners

18. VIDEO: Leuren Moret - Fukushima tectonic nuclear warfare monitored by world HAARP partners

http://www.examiner.com/exopolitics-in-seattle/leuren-moret-fukushima-tectonic-nuclear-warfare-monitored-by-world-haarp-partners-video

17. YOU TUBE: Leuren Moret - Fukushima tectonic nuclear warfare monitored by world HAARP partners

http://youtu.be/Z95xcFW8lPU

16. Scientist Leuren Moret: Radiation war intensifies with HAARP tornadoes in USA

http://www.examiner.com/exopolitics-in-seattle/scientist-leuren-moret-radiation-war-intensifies-with-haarp-tornadoes-usa

15. VIDEO: Scientist Leuren Moret: Radiation war intensifies with HAARP tornadoes in USA

http://www.examiner.com/exopolitics-in-seattle/scientist-leuren-moret-radiation-war-intensifies-with-haarp-tornadoes-usa-video

14. YOUTUBE: Scientist Leuren Moret: Radiation war intensifies with HAARP tornadoes in USA

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgRlYt5DjJY

13. Coverup! California, Northwest, B.C. Canada under radiation as high as Japan

http://www.examiner.com/exopolitics-in-seattle/coverup-california-northwest-b-c-canada-under-radiation-as-high-as-japan

12. VIDEO: Coverup! California, Northwest, B.C. Canada under radiation as high as Japan

http://www.examiner.com/exopolitics-in-seattle/leuren-moret-coverup-california-northwest-usa-bc-canada-under-radiation-threat-as-high-as-japan-video

11. YOUTUBE: Coverup! California, Northwest, B.C. Canada under radiation as high as Japan

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zL3M3kvgI0

10. YOUTUBE: Leuren Moret - Scientists declare northern one-third of Japan uninhabitable and should be evacuated

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_kTC8GqlwQ

9. Scientist: U.S., Canada, Mexico, Hawaii targeted in nuclear war from Japan

http://www.examiner.com/exopolitics-in-seattle/scientist-u-s-canada-mexico-hawaii-targeted-nuclear-war-from-japan

8. VIDEO: Scientist: U.S., Canada, Mexico, Hawaii targeted in nuclear war from Japan

http://www.examiner.com/exopolitics-in-seattle/leuren-moret-japan-nuclear-war-targets-us-canada-mexico-and-hawaii-video

7. YOUTUBE: Scientist: U.S., Canada, Mexico, Hawaii targeted in nuclear war from Japan

Leuren Moret - Japan nuclear war targets US Canada Mexico and Hawaii.m4v

6. Scientist: Japan earthquake, nuke “accident” are tectonic nuclear warfare

http://www.examiner.com/exopolitics-in-seattle/scientist-japan-earthquake-nuke-accident-are-tectonic-nuclear-warfare

5. VIDEO: Scientist Leuren Moret - Japan earthquake and nuclear "accident" are tectonic nuclear warfare

http://www.examiner.com/exopolitics-in-seattle/scientist-leuren-moret-japan-earthquake-and-nuclear-accident-are-tectonic-nuclear-warfare-video

4. YOUTUBE: Scientist Leuren Moret - Japan earthquake and nuclear "accident" are tectonic nuclear warfare

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5WxmeOqYtB0

3. VIDEO: Leuren Moret - Coverup! California, Northwest USA, B.C. Canada under radiation threat as high as Japan

http://vimeo.com/22003021

2. VIDEO: Leuren Moret - Scientists declare northern 1/3 of Japan uninhabitable and should be evacuated - BREAKING NEWS

http://vimeo.com/22003275

1. U.S. SPACE SHUTTLE & HAARP/CHEMTRAILS:

A. BREAKING NEWS - Leuren Moret: US Space shuttle covert mission was chemtrails in space for HAARP

http://www.examiner.com/exopolitics-in-seattle/leuren-moret-us-space-shuttle-covert-mission-was-chemtrails-space-for-haarp

B. YOUTUBE: Leuren Moret: US Space shuttle covert mission was chemtrails in space for HAARP

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tH0vJR8nLKw

_____________________
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Copyright Alfred Lambremont Webre JD, MEd, All right reserved

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FIJI Water and Parent Company Still Rolling in the Dirty Water

FIJI Water and Parent Company Still Rolling in the Water

by Kai Olson-Sawyer | 08.29.2011 |

FIJI Water and Paramount Farms - both owned by parent company, Roll Global - are familiar with scandal and legal troubles, much of it involving water. Digital image by Weiling Fu.

So far, 2011 has been a tough year for scandal-prone California agribusiness giant and holding company, Roll International, which might be part of the reason for the company’s recent yet minor name change to Roll Global. (Of course, I’m kidding. It’s for tax purposes, right?) After all the bad press last year about how Roll International Global – the parent company of luxury bottled water brand FIJI Water, among other well-known businesses – established itself as a community-draining water-taker extraordinaire, it’s not unexpected that the corporation might want to distance itself from…itself. Belief in corporate personhood aside , it’s actually the Beverly Hills-based, billionaire socialite couple, Stewart and Lynda Resnick, who are probably dismayed.

2011 tasted sour from the start for the Resnick’s equally loved and derided FIJI Water brand thanks to the publicized scuffle over a new Fiji government-imposed 8 cents per liter tax. A negligible-looking cost from the outside, this royalty is a huge increase compared to the teensy 1/3 cent per liter tax that had previously been levied. In November 2010, a row over the tax erupted between the government and FIJI Water. The company shut down bottling operations in dramatic protest, only to accede and get back to bottling a couple days later.

Despite FIJI Water’s indignation about any form of taxation, there are signs that the new tax revenue might benefit the citizens of Fiji, of whom slightly less than half have access to clean water. To reduce the problem of clean water access and to comply with the U.N.’s Millennium Development Goals, the Fiji Water Authority has committed to providing 60 percent of its inhabitants with clean drinking water by 2014. Here’s hoping the ruling military government puts the tax revenue towards improved drinking water quality and access, a moral imperative and a fundamental for building any healthy, stable and prosperous society.

More recently, Roll Global experienced another dent to their image, this time here in the States, in an all-too-familiar form: a lawsuit. The problems flow from the company’s immense 125,000-acre Paramount Farm in California’s San Joaquin Valley which, according to their website, is the “world’s largest grower and processor of almonds and pistachios.” In this case, Paramount Farms, along with other politically powerful farmers in the area, began withdrawing so much groundwater from the two water banks they control that it drastically dropped water levels for residents of a small, local utility. The Rosedale-Rio Bravo Water Storage District is now suing the water banks’ authority, Kern County Water Agency, because of a revoked Memo of Understanding that gave certain rights to the utility.

One of the banks – the Kern Water Bank – was established under particularly sketchy circumstances and is no stranger to lawsuits ever since the Resnicks – through Paramount Farms – began buying up area land and water rights “Chinatown-style” in the 1980s-90s. After Roll claimed these water rights with the land purchases, they and other wealthy landowners created the water bank using public funds, giving them unlimited withdrawals and the ability to resell water for big profits, neglecting nearby residents without clean water access in the process.

Most galling to Roll Global must be the coverage by The New York Times of the pending Rosedale-Rio Bravo Water Storage District lawsuit. While there was already media scrutiny about the secretive circumstances surrounding the transition of the Kern Water Bank to Paramount Farms ownership, the buzz has stayed mainly within the borders of California where, one might imagine, Roll Global hopes it will remain.

As an agribusiness and water bottler, water is the lifeblood of the corporate giant. The Resnicks rightfully own their businesses and can operate as they see fit. Besides going after cheap water no matter the means, Roll Global is like other companies, especially in the food and beverage industry, that promote their greenness and health-consciousness, even though their products may not be all that green or healthy. Their Foundation and community-building projects do provide some genuine support to worthwhile causes, but the entirety of their programs in combination with their marketing and PR campaigns don’t wipe away all that they’ve wrought.

The pursuit of water is the hidden pea in Roll Global’s corporate shell game. The company uses its multiple businesses and subsidiaries to evade corporate accountability while actually engaging in business practices that both undermine its stated values and obfuscate the many negative effects of these decisions. By making the connections between the unseemly behavior exhibited by the Resnicks, Roll Global, FIJI Water, Paramount Farms and Kern County Water Agency, we get a fuller picture of what is going on behind the scenes and, in the end, are given the opportunity to make consumer choices consistent with our principles.

Virginia Quake Raises More Questions about U.S. East Coast Infrastructure

Virginia Quake Raises More Questions about U.S. East Coast Infrastructure

The U.S. east coast endures far fewer temblors than the west coast, but damage to dams on the "right coast" could be significant given the older architecture

By Michael Moyer | August 24, 2011




Image: Conowingo Dam, 16 October 1996, Copyright 1996 by Edward J. Clear/Wikimedia Commons

Could it happen here? That was the big question in the U.S. in the hours and days after a magnitude 9.0 earthquake and resulting tsunami crippled the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant and destroyed the surrounding region. Most American worries focused on the integrity of our nation's rapidly aging nuclear power plants, many of which are still churning through uranium long past the reactors' original expected lifetimes. Fears were piqued again August 23 when a magnitude 5.8 temblor struck central Virginia, threatening power plants up and down the east coast. But a quieter danger lingers near many of our cities and towns. Tens of thousands of dams, many built before seismic engineering came of age, have the potential to release tsunami-like flash floods in the event of a seismic breach.

In 2009 the American Society of Civil Engineers released a survey of the state of infrastructure in the U.S. The group found that dams are, on average, in terrible disrepair. Of the more than 85,000 dams, more than 4,000 are unsafe or deficient, and nearly 1,800 of those are located where a breach would cause severe damage to life or property. With so many dams, it is hard to know where the gravest danger lies. The average budget for dam inspectors is distressingly low. For instance, Texas employs just seven inspectors to keep an eye on 7,400 dams, and in many states inspectors lack the authority to inspect private dams, including those built to hold back the chemical by-products of mining operations. A report by Switzerland's Paul Scherrer Institute estimates that dams are the most potentially hazardous source of energy. A catastrophe at an average dam has the potential to kill 11,000 people. The second-most-hazardous energy source? Nuclear.

Decades ago, engineers frequently built dams using a slurry of soil and water that would eventually settle into place. Unfortunately, an earthquake might liquefy the core of the dam. Although these dams were most often built in locations that were not thought to suffer from earthquakes (the Lower San Fernando Dam that nearly failed in a 1971 earthquake in the Los Angeles area is a notable exception), our knowledge of just where and when an earthquake may strike is no longer limited to the west coast. "New York City wasn't supposed to be seismic 20 or 30 years ago," says Tarek Abdoun, a civil engineer at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, "but the standard for what should require seismic loading has changed." In the past few decades, seismologists have discovered potentially serious fault lines everywhere from the Carolinas to Missouri.

Engineers have begun the process of retrofitting dams that suddenly are found to be located in earthquake-prone areas. But progress is slow and expensive. The Association of State Dam Safety Officials estimates that $50 billion would be needed to repair all the nation's faulty dams. Until that money comes through, fragile nuclear reactors should not be our only worry.

Virginia Quake Raises More Questions about U.S. East Coast Infrastructure

Blackspot Blog

What is Mental Environmentalism?

A brief history of "The Journal of the Mental Environment."

Micah White

• Bill Schmalz
• history of Adbusters
• Kalle Lasn
• mental environment
• Satori in the Right Cortex

Photo by James Porto, jamesporto.com

The core idea behind Adbusters, the essential critique that motivates our struggle against consumer society, is mental environmentalism. And for seventeen years, since the seventh issue of Adbusters was published in 1993, the subtitle of the magazine has been "The Journal of the Mental Environment". But, what exactly is mental environmentalism?

Adbusters was founded in 1989 by Kalle Lasn and Bill Schmalz, a duo of award-winning documentary filmmakers living in Vancouver, British Columbia. Since the early 1980s, Lasn had been making films that explored the spiritual and cultural lessons the West could learn from the Japanese experience with capitalism. One film in particular, Satori in the Right Cortex (1985), anticipates the culture jammer emphasis on sparking life-changing epiphanies. The experience of satori, the Buddhist word for a flash of intuitive enlightenment, became a founding tactical insight for the culture jammer movement.

In a 2001 interview with the Kyoto Journal, Lasn explained the importance of this film on the theory behind Adbusters:

"When I was shooting a film in Japan called Satori in the Right Cortex, I asked the head monk of a Zen monastery in Kamakura if I could take footage of his disciples meditating. Yes, he said, but first you must meditate. When I emerged after a few days of physical and psychological torture, something really had happened to me. The monk had forced an interruption of my easy routine, and I came out the other end humble, euphoric and changed. Maybe only when you are shoved into a new pattern of behavior like that, it is possible to catch a glimpse of the way life could be. Culture jamming is based on the same concept. It's a way of stopping the flow of the consumer spectacle long enough to adjust your set."

Likewise, Adbusters itself was born out of a life-changing epiphany.

In 1988, the British Columbia Council of Forest Industries, the "voice" of the logging industry, was facing tremendous public pressure from a growing environmentalist movement. The logging industry fought back with a television ad campaign called "Forests Forever". It was an early example of "greenwashing": shots of happy children, workers and animals with a kindly, trustworthy sounding narrator who assured the public that the logging industry was protecting the forest.

Lasn and Shmalz were outraged by the blatant use of the public airwaves to deliver deceptive anti-environmentalist propaganda. And they fought back by producing the "Talking Rainforest" anti-ad in which an old-growth tree explains to a sapling that "a tree farm is not a forest". But when the meme warrior duo went to buy airtime on the same stations that had aired the forest industry ad, they were refused. Adbusters was born in the startling realization that citizens do not have the same access to the information flows as corporations. One of our key campaigns continues to be the Media Carta, a "movement to enshrine The Right to Communicate in the constitutions of all free nations, and in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights".

For Adbusters, concern over the flow of information goes beyond the desire to protect democratic transparency, freedom of speech or the public's access to the airwaves. Although these are worthwhile causes, Adbusters instead situates the battle of the mind at the center of its political agenda. Fighting to counter pro-consumerist advertising is done not as a means to an end, but as the end in itself. This shift in emphasis is a crucial element of mental environmentalism.

If a key insight of environmentalism was that external reality, nature, could be polluted by industrial toxins, the key insight of mental environmentalism is that internal reality, our minds, can be polluted by infotoxins. Mental environmentalism draws a connection between the pollution of our minds by commercial messaging and the social, environmental, financial and ethical catastrophes that loom before humanity. Mental environmentalists argue that a whole range of phenomenon from the BP oil spill to the emergence of crony-democracy to the mass extinction of animals to the significant increase in mental illnesses are directly caused by the three thousand advertisements that assault our minds each day. And rather than treat the symptoms, by rushing to scrub the oil soaked beaches or passing watered down environmental protection legislation, mental environmentalists target the root cause: the advertising industry that fuels consumerism.

Our minds are polluted by an overwhelming propaganda assault that colors our beliefs, desires and perception of reality. Fighting back is thus far more difficult that protesting in the streets or clicking a few links. This brings us back to the concept of satori. Breaking out of the consumer mindscape takes a fundamental shift of perspective, an epiphany, after which everything is seen with new eyes.

Mental environmentalism is an emergent movement that in the coming years will be recognized as the fundamental social struggle of our era. It is both a unifying struggle – among mental environmentalists there are everything from conservative Mormons to far-left anarchists – and a struggle that finally, concretely explains the cause of the diversity of ills that threaten us.

To escape the mental chains, and finally pull off the glorious emancipatory revolution the left has so long hoped for, we must become meme warriors who, through the use of culture jamming, spark a wave of epiphanies that shatter the consumerist worldview.

—Micah White

The Burning River Revisited

House GOP Moves to Gut the Clean Water Act

Stacie Thomas

The Cuyahoga Revisited

May 2000 • Volume: 50 • Issue: 5 •

In sum, the Cuyahoga fire, which burns on in people’s memory as a symbol of industrial indifference, should also be viewed as a symbol of the weaknesses of public regulation.

Stacie Thomas is an economist with the Senate Banking Committee in Washington, D.C. This is adapted from PERC Reports, June 1999.

Early in the summer of 1969, the Cuyahoga River caught fire. Piles of logs, picnic benches, and other debris had collected below a railroad trestle, which impeded their movement down the river. These piles only lacked a spark to set them afire. A passing train with a broken wheel bearing probably provided that spark, igniting the debris that, in turn, lighted the kerosene-laden oil floating on top of the river.

The fire burned only 24 minutes—too short a time for the Cleveland Plain Dealer to catch a photo—and at first it attracted little attention. However, in the following months the fire became a symbol of a polluted America. It helped galvanize the environmental movement. Even today, the idea of the burning river remains a symbol of industrial neglect of the environment.

A few things have been ignored in the legend surrounding the Cuyahoga fire:

• The Cuyahoga, which flows through the city of Cleveland into Lake Erie, had caught fire at least two times before (in 1936 and 1952). The earlier fires burned much longer and caused much more damage.
• While oil on the river burned, most of the fuel was not industrial but, rather, logs, debris, and household waste washed downstream by the periodic storms that roil the deep, fast-moving river many miles above Cleveland.
• Most important for our understanding of environmental problems, the fire came about because political control replaced the emerging common-law rule of strict liability. Had that doctrine been allowed to hold sway, there would probably not have been a fire in 1969.

The industrial stretches of the Cuyahoga River were indeed polluted in 1969 and had been for many years. In the 1930s, for example, the people of Cleveland had clean drinking water from Lake Erie. So municipal authorities left the Cuyahoga River alone—allowing firms along its banks to discharge into it at will.

Not everyone was content with that policy. In some cases Cuyahoga water was too polluted even for industrial use. In 1936, a paper manufacturer on Kingsbury Run, a tributary of the Cuyahoga, sued the city of Cleveland to stop it from dumping raw sewage into the stream.

The city responded by saying that it had used the stream as a sewer since 1860 and that therefore it had a “prescriptive right” to use it that way. The Ohio court agreed with the city. It stated that when part of a stream “being wholly within a municipal corporation, so that none but its residents are thereby affected, is generally devoted to the purposes of an open sewer for more than 21 years . . . it becomes charged with a servitude authorizing its like use by other riparian owners” (City of Cleveland v. Standard Bag & Paper Co.).

So much for protection of riparian rights in 1936! However, that attitude changed rapidly. By 1948, the doctrine of strict liability was taking hold. Another Ohio court decision states that “one may not obtain by prescription, or otherwise than by purchase, a right to cast sewage upon the lands of another without his consent” (Vian v. Sheffield). Other rulings were similar.

Concern About Pollution

Incomes were rising, and concern about industrial wastes was mounting. Pollutants were corroding sewage treatment systems and impeding their operation. In another part of the state, the Ohio River Sanitation Commis sion, representing the eight states that border the Ohio River (which runs along Ohio’s southern border), developed innovations to reduce pollution. The municipalities and the industries along the Ohio began to invest in pollution control technology.

Unfortunately, this progress soon ended. The evolving common law and regional compacts hit a snag in 1951 when the state of Ohio created the Ohio Water Pollution Control Board. The authorizing law sounded good to the citizens of Ohio. It stated that it is “unlawful” to pollute any Ohio waters. However, the law continues: “except in such cases where the water pollution control board has issued a valid and unexpired permit.”

The board issued or denied permits depending on whether the discharger was located on an already-degraded river classified as “industrial use” or on trout streams classified as “recreational use.” Trout streams were preserved; dischargers were allowed to pollute industrial streams. The growing tendency of the courts to insist on protecting private rights against harm from pollution was replaced by a public body that allowed pollution where it thought it was appropriate.

During the 1960s, attempts were made to revive the application of common-law rights to stop pollution of the Cuyahoga. Those complaints were redirected to the state or local agency in charge of managing water quality, with one exception. In 1965, Bar Realty Corporation sued the city and the board to compel them to enforce the city’s pollution control ordinances against industrial polluters. The judge agreed, and directed the city and the board to stop pollution of the Cuyahoga. However, the Ohio Supreme Court overturned the ruling because Cleveland’s ordinances were in conflict with state statutes. Management by permit continued to dominate other institutional arrangements on the Cuyahoga.

Cleveland Mayor Carl Stokes, who helped draw attention to the Cuyahoga fire, criticized the state for letting industries pollute. “We have no jurisdiction over what is dumped in there . . . . The state gives [industry] a license to pollute,” the Cleveland Plain Dealer quoted him as saying (June 24, 1969). Stokes was not far off the mark. However, he thought the solution was to move to federal regulation rather than back to the guidance provided by court decisions.

The famous fire illustrates the unfortunate history of pollution control in the United States. Growing citizen concern about pollution was leading to voluntary cleanup, but the emerging common-law rule of strict liability was abandoned in favor of a political process that allowed continuing pollution of certain segments of the state’s waters.

By catering to special interests, Ohio’s regulatory scheme stopped the emergence of a doctrine that would have spurred cleanup. It also helped propel the nation toward national legislation and its costly technological specifications. The Clean Water Act of 1972 may have led to change on the Cuyahoga, but it also stifled innovation in pollution control and wasted vast sums of money, both industry’s and the taxpayer’s. (See Bruce Yandle, Common Sense and Common Law for the Environment [Lanham Md.: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1997], pp. 76-77.)

In sum, the Cuyahoga fire, which burns on in people’s memory as a symbol of industrial indifference, should also be viewed as a symbol of the weaknesses of public regulation.