AlterNet.org: Environment

NSA's Domestic Surveillance Is Motivated by Fears That Environmental Disasters Could Fuel Anti-Government Activism

Nafeez Ahmed, The Guardian — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 14:38:00 -0700

Pentagon concern over "anti-government and radical ideologies that potentially threaten government stability."

Top secret US National Security Agency (NSA) documents disclosed by the Guardian have shocked the world with revelations of a comprehensive US-based surveillance system with direct access to Facebook, Apple, Google, Microsoft and other tech giants. New Zealandcourt records suggest that data harvested by the NSA's Prism system has been fed into the Five Eyes intelligence alliance whose members also include the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

But why have Western security agencies developed such an unprecedented capacity to spy on their own domestic populations? Since the 2008 economic crash, security agencies have increasingly spied on political activists, especially environmental groups, on behalf of corporate interests. This activity is linked to the last decade of US defence planning, which has been increasingly concerned by the risk of civil unrest at home triggered by catastrophic events linked to climate change, energy shocks or economic crisis - or all three.

Just last month, unilateral changes to US military laws formally granted the Pentagon extraordinary powers to intervene in a domestic "emergency" or "civil disturbance":

"Federal military commanders have the authority, in extraordinary emergency circumstances where prior authorization by the President is impossible and duly constituted local authorities are unable to control the situation, to engage temporarily in activities that are necessary to quell large-scale, unexpected civil disturbances."

Other documents show that the "extraordinary emergencies" the Pentagon is worried about include a range of environmental and related disasters.

In 2006, the US National Security Strategy warned that:

"Environmental destruction, whether caused by human behavior or cataclysmic mega-disasters such as floods, hurricanes, earthquakes, or tsunamis. Problems of this scope may overwhelm the capacity of local authorities to respond, and may even overtax national militaries, requiring a larger international response."

Two years later, the Department of Defense's (DoD) Army Modernisation Strategy described the arrival of a new "era of persistent conflict" due to competition for "depleting natural resources and overseas markets" fuelling "future resource wars over water, food and energy." The report predicted a resurgence of:

"... anti-government and radical ideologies that potentially threaten government stability."

In the same year, a report by the US Army's Strategic Studies Institute warned that a series of domestic crises could provoke large-scale civil unrest. The path to "disruptive domestic shock" could include traditional threats such as deployment of WMDs, alongside "catastrophic natural and human disasters" or "pervasive public health emergencies" coinciding with "unforeseen economic collapse." Such crises could lead to "loss of functioning political and legal order" leading to "purposeful domestic resistance or insurgency...

"DoD might be forced by circumstances to put its broad resources at the disposal of civil authorities to contain and reverse violent threats to domestic tranquility. Under the most extreme circumstances, this might include use of military force against hostile groups inside the United States. Further, DoD would be, by necessity, an essential enabling hub for the continuity of political authority in a multi-state or nationwide civil conflict or disturbance."

That year, the Pentagon had begun developing a 20,000 strong troop force who would be on-hand to respond to "domestic catastrophes" and civil unrest - the programme was reportedly based on a 2005 homeland security strategy which emphasised "preparing for multiple, simultaneous mass casualty incidents."

The following year, a US Army-funded RAND Corp study called for a US force presence specifically to deal with civil unrest.

Such fears were further solidified in a detailed 2010 study by the US Joint Forces Command - designed to inform "joint concept development and experimentation throughout the Department of Defense" - setting out the US military's definitive vision for future trends and potential global threats. Climate change, the study said, would lead to increased risk of:

"... tsunamis, typhoons, hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes and other natural catastrophes... Furthermore, if such a catastrophe occurs within the United States itself - particularly when the nation's economy is in a fragile state or where US military bases or key civilian infrastructure are broadly affected - the damage to US security could be considerable."

The study also warned of a possible shortfall in global oil output by 2015:

"A severe energy crunch is inevitable without a massive expansion of production and refining capacity. While it is difficult to predict precisely what economic, political, and strategic effects such a shortfall might produce, it surely would reduce the prospects for growth in both the developing and developed worlds. Such an economic slowdown would exacerbate other unresolved tensions."

That year the DoD's Quadrennial Defense Review seconded such concerns, while recognising that "climate change, energy security, and economic stability are inextricably linked."

Also in 2010, the Pentagon ran war games to explore the implications of "large scale economic breakdown" in the US impacting on food supplies and other essential services, as well as how to maintain "domestic order amid civil unrest."

Speaking about the group's conclusions at giant US defence contractor Booz Allen Hamilton's conference facility in Virginia, Lt Col. Mark Elfendahl - then chief of the Joint and Army Concepts Division - highlighted homeland operations as a way to legitimise the US military budget:

"An increased focus on domestic activities might be a way of justifying whatever Army force structure the country can still afford."

Two months earlier, Elfendahl explained in a DoD roundtable that future planning was needed:

"Because technology is changing so rapidly, because there's so much uncertainty in the world, both economically and politically, and because the threats are so adaptive and networked, because they live within the populations in many cases."

The 2010 exercises were part of the US Army's annual Unified Questprogramme which more recently, based on expert input from across the Pentagon, has explored the prospect that "ecological disasters and a weak economy" (as the "recovery won't take root until 2020") will fuel migration to urban areas, ramping up social tensions in the US homeland as well as within and between "resource-starved nations."

NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden was a computer systems administrator for Booz Allen Hamilton, where he directly handled the NSA's IT systems, including the Prism surveillance system. According toBooz Allen's 2011 Annual Report, the corporation has overseen Unified Quest "for more than a decade" to help "military and civilian leaders envision the future."

The latest war games, the report reveals, focused on "detailed, realistic scenarios with hypothetical 'roads to crisis'", including "homeland operations" resulting from "a high-magnitude natural disaster" among other scenarios, in the context of:

"... converging global trends [which] may change the current security landscape and future operating environment... At the end of the two-day event, senior leaders were better prepared to understand new required capabilities and force design requirements to make homeland operations more effective."

It is therefore not surprising that the increasing privatisation of intelligence has coincided with the proliferation of domestic surveillance operations against political activists, particularly those linked to environmental and social justice protest groups.

Department of Homeland Security documents released in April prove a "systematic effort" by the agency "to surveil and disrupt peaceful demonstrations" linked to Occupy Wall Street, according to the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF).

Similarly, FBI documents confirmed "a strategic partnership between the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and the private sector" designed to produce intelligence on behalf of "the corporate security community." A PCJF spokesperson remarked that the documents show "federal agencies functioning as a de facto intelligence arm of Wall Street and Corporate America."

In particular, domestic surveillance has systematically targeted peaceful environment activists including anti-fracking activists across the US, such as the Gas Drilling Awareness Coalition, Rising Tide North America, the People's Oil & Gas Collaborative, and Greenpeace. Similar trends are at play in the UK, where the case of undercover policeman Mark Kennedy revealed the extent of the state's involvement in monitoring the environmental direct action movement.

A University of Bath study citing the Kennedy case, and based on confidential sources, found that a whole range of corporations - such as McDonald's, Nestle and the oil major Shell, "use covert methods to gather intelligence on activist groups, counter criticism of their strategies and practices, and evade accountability."

Indeed, Kennedy's case was just the tip of the iceberg - internal police documents obtained by the Guardian in 2009 revealed that environment activists had been routinely categorised as "domestic extremists" targeting "national infrastructure" as part of a wider strategy tracking protest groups and protestors.

Superintendent Steve Pearl, then head of the National Extremism Tactical Coordination Unit (Nectu), confirmed at that time how his unit worked with thousands of companies in the private sector. Nectu, according to Pearl, was set up by the Home Office because it was "getting really pressured by big business - pharmaceuticals in particular, and the banks." He added that environmental protestors were being brought "more on the radar." The programme continues today, despite police acknowledgements that environmentalists have not been involved in "violent acts."

The Pentagon knows that environmental, economic and other crises could provoke widespread public anger toward government and corporations in coming years. The revelations on the NSA's global surveillance programmes are just the latest indication that as business as usual creates instability at home and abroad, and as disillusionment with the status quo escalates, Western publics are being increasingly viewed as potential enemies that must be policed by the state.

Dr Nafeez Ahmed is executive director of the Institute for Policy Research & Development and author of A User's Guide to the Crisis of Civilisation: And How to Save It among other books. Follow him on Twitter @nafeezahmed

Life in the Green Lane: Protected Bike Lanes Transform the Experience of Riding

Jay Walljasper, AlterNet — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 12:49:00 -0700

Protected bike lanes, now called Green Lanes, are popping up from Miami to Long Beach, Austin to Chicago.

How to describe your first time in a green lane? There’s nothing quite like it.

For me it happened on a business trip to Copenhagen. I saw bikes everywhere, beginning with the taxi ride from the airport where I spotted business executives toting briefcases on bikes, wanna-be fashion models wearing high heels on bikes, kids heading to school on bikes, parents pedaling toddlers to daycare on bikes, old folks chatting to one another on bikes.

How do they do it, I wondered? I was a seasoned bicyclist who rode every day for commuting and recreation yet still felt tense wheeling down busy city streets. These riders looked completely at ease, even in the midst of morning rush hour with cars, buses, trucks and motorcycles all around them. I even saw one guy smoking a cigarette on a bike and others absorbed in conversations on their mobile phones.

Then I looked down and noticed that the bike lane was separated from motor vehicles by a divider. So that’s how they do it! I couldn’t wait to try it myself.

The next day I ducked out of a meeting, rented a bike at nearby shop and set forth to explore Copenhagen on two wheels. After pedaling just a block, I thought “Wow!” and began giggling. This was an entirely new experience in biking-- almost like the exhilaration of riding without training wheels for the first time.

Liberated from fears of being sideswiped by motorists, I could take in the historic architecture and enjoy the city’s teeming streetlife. There were even special traffic signals for bicyclists, giving us a slight head start through crowded intersections. No wonder half of Copenhagen’s downtown commuters travel by bike.

Cruising through the heart of the city, I realized that these protected bike lanes were good for everyone, not just bicyclists. Without them, pedestrians, motorists and bus riders would be engulfed by twice as much traffic. That, I figured, accounted for the calm courtesy I experienced from people behind the wheel.

We need something like this in the U.S., I told everyone back home. Impossible, many folks would tell me. Special bike lanes are strictly a European thing that would never fit in our newer, auto-dominated cities. You’re selling America short, I answered. We are an enterprising nation, dedicated to innovations that can improve our lives. If we can invent the Internet, we can make biking safe for everyone.

And that’s exactly what’s happening right now. Protected bike lanes (now called Green Lanes) are popping up from Miami to Long Beach, Austin to Chicago. As I ride the new protected bike lanes downtown here in Minneapolis, I say “Wow!” and then giggle. I can appreciate the handsome old warehouses and enjoy the bustling streetlife. I notice people in suits and in high-fashion outfits on bikes, even some teenagers and older riders. It feels even more exhilarating than the first time Copenhagen, because it’s right here at home.

When Drones Guard the Pipeline: The Militarization of Our Fossil Fuels

Winona LaDuke with Frank Molley, Honor the Earth — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 14:22:00 -0700

The militarization of the energy fields is not new. It’s just more apparent when it’s in a first world country.

Someone needs to explain to me why wanting clean drinking water makes you an activist, and why proposing to destroy water with chemical warfare doesn’t make a corporation a terrorist.

I’m in South Dakota today, sort of a ground zero for the XL Keystone Pipeline, that pipeline, owned by a Canadian Corporation which will export tar sands oil to the rest of the world. This is the heart of the North American continent here. Bwaan Akiing is what we call this land-Land of the Lakota. There are no pipelines across it, and beneath it is the Oglalla Aquifer wherein lies the vast majority of the water for this region. The Lakota understand that water is life, and that there is no new water. It turns out, tar sands carrying pipelines (otherwise called “dilbit”) are sixteen times more likely to break than a conventional pipeline, and it seems that some ranchers and Native people, in a new Cowboy and Indian Alliance, are intent upon protecting that water.

This community understands the price of protecting land. And, the use of military force upon a civilian community- carrying an acute memory of the over 133,000 rounds of ammunition fired by the National Guard upon Lakota people forty years ago in the Wounded Knee standoff. That experience is coming home again, this time in Mi’gmaq territory.

Militarization of North American Oil Fields

This past week in New Brunswick, the Canadian military came out to protect oil companies. In this case, seismic testing for potential natural gas reserves by Southwestern Energy Company(SWN), a Texas based company working in the province. It’s an image of extreme energy, and perhaps the times.

SWN exercised it’s permit to conduct preliminary testing to assess resource potential for shale gas exploitation. Canadian constitutional law requires the consultation with First Nations, and this has not occurred. That’s when Elsipogtog Mi’gmaq warrior chief, John Levi, seized a vehicle containing seismic testing equipment owned by SWN. Their claim is that fracking is illegal without their permission on their traditional territory. About 65 protesters, including women and children, seized the truck at a gas station and surrounded the vehicle so that it couldn’t be removed from the parking lot. Levi says that SWN broke the law when they first started fracking “in our traditional hunting grounds, medicine grounds, contaminating our waters.” according to reporter Jane Mundy in on line Lawyers and Settlements publication. This may be just the beginning.

On June 9, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) came out en masse, seemingly to protect SWN seismic exploration crews against peaceful protesters – both native and non-Native, blocking route 126 from seismic thumper trucks. Armed with guns, paddy wagons and twist tie restraints, peaceful protestors were arrested. Four days later the protesting continued, and this time drew the attention of local military personnel. As one Mi’gmag said, “Just who is calling the shots in New Brunswick when the value of the land and water take a backseat to the risks associated with shale gas development?”

The militarization of the energy fields is not new. It’s just more apparent when it’s in a first world country, albeit New Brunswick. New Brunswick is sort of the El Salvador of Canadian provinces, if one looks at the economy, run akin to an oligarchy. New Brunswick’s Irving family empire stretches from oil and gas to media, they are the largest employer in New Brunswick and the primary proponents of the Trans Canada West to East pipeline which will bring tar sands oil to the St. Johns refinery owned by the same family. Irving is the fourth wealthiest family in Canada, the largest employer, land holder and amasses that wealth in the relatively poor province. The Saint John refinery would be a beneficiary of any natural gas fracked in the province. In general, press coverage of Aboriginal issues is sparse there at best.

Fracking proposals have come to their territory with a vengeance, and the perfect political storm has emerged- immense material poverty (seven of the ten poorest postal codes in Canada), a set of starve or sell federal agreements pushed by the Harper administration (on first nations), and extreme energy drives.

Each fracking well will take up to two-million-gallons of pristine water and transform the water into a toxic soup, full of carcinogens. The subsistence economy has been central to the Wabanaki confederacy since time immemorial, and concerns over SWN’s water contamination have come to the province. A recent Arkansas lawsuit against SWN charges the company with widespread toxic contamination of drinking water from their hydro-fracking.

Canada is the home to 75% of the worlds mining corporations, and they have tended to have relative impunity in the Canadian courts. Canadian corporations and their international subsidiaries are being protected by military forces elsewhere, and this concerns many. According to a U.K. Guardian story, a Québec Court of Appeal rejected a suit by citizens of the Democratic Republic of the Congo against Montreal-based Anvil Mining Limited for allegedly providing logistical support to the DRC army as it carried out a massacre, killing as many as 100 people in the town of Kilwa near the company's silver and copper mine. The Supreme Court of Canada later confirmed that Canadian courts had no jurisdiction over the company's actions in the DRC when it rejected the plaintiffs' request to appeal. Kairos Canada, a faith-based organization, concluded that the Supreme Court's ruling would "have broader implications for other victims of human rights abuses committed by Canadian companies and their chances of bringing similar cases to our courts".

In the meantime, back in New Brunswick, a heavily militarized RCMP came out to protect the exploration crews. Opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline has many faces, from ranchers in Nebraska and Texas who reject eminent domain takings of their land for a pipeline right of way, to the Lakota nation which walked out of State Department meetings in May in a show of firm opposition to the pipeline. All of them are facing a pipeline owned by TransCanada, a Canadian Corporation.

On a worldwide scale communities are concerned about their water. In El Salvador, more than 60% of the population relies on a single source of water. In 2009, this came down to choosing between drinking water and mining. In 2009, after immense public pressure, the country chose water. It established a moratorium on metal mining permits. Polls show that a strong majority of Salvadorans would now like a permanent ban. A testament to how things can change even in a politically challenged environment.

Up in Canada’s version of El Salvador, twelve people, both native and non were arrested, some detained and interrogated by investigators by the RCMP forces on June l4, and after a day of the federal military “making their presence” felt, the people of the region have concerns about how far Canada will go to protect fossil fuels.

Here in Bwaan Akiing, I am hoping that people who want to protect the water are treated with respect. And, I also have to hope that those 7,000 plus American owned drones aren’t coming home, omaa akiing, from elsewhere to our territories in the name of Canadian oil interests.

Video by Charles LeBlanc

Winona LaDuke is the Executive Director of Honor the Earth in White Earth Reservation, MN.

Fracking Is Already Straining U.S. Water Supplies

Tom Kentworthy, Think Progress — Sat, 15 Jun 2013 20:38:00 -0700

Some of America's most intensive oil and gas development is occurring in drought-prone regions where water is scarce.

As the level of hydraulic fracturing of oil and gas wells in the United States has intensified in recent years, much of the mounting public concern has centered on fears that underground water supplies could be contaminated with the toxic chemicals used in the well-stimulation technique that cracks rock formations and releases trapped oil and gas. But in some parts of the country, worries are also growing about fracking’s effect on water supply, as the water-intensive process stirs competition for the resources already stretched thin by drought or other factors.

Every fracking job requires 2 million to 4 million gallons of water, according to the Groundwater Protection Council. The Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA, has estimated that the 35,000 oil and gas wells used for fracking consume between 70 billion and 140 billion gallons of water each year. That’s about equal, EPA says, to the water use in 40 to 80 cities with populations of 50,000 people, or one to two cities with a population of 2.5 million each.

Some of the most intensive oil and gas development in the nation is occurring in regions where water is already at a premium. A paper published last month by Ceres, a nonprofit that works on sustainability issues, looked at 25,000 shale oil and shale gas wells in operation and monitored by an industry-tied reporting website called FracFocus.

Ceres found that 47 percent of these wells were in areas “with high or extremely high water stress” because of large withdrawals for use by industry, agriculture, and municipalities. In Colorado, for example, 92 percent of the wells were in extremely high water-stress areas, and in Texas more than half were in high or extremely high water-stress areas.

“Given projected sharp increases in production in the coming years and the potentially intense nature of local water demands, competition and conflicts over water should be a growing concern for companies, policymakers and investors,” the Ceres report concluded. It goes on to say that:

Prolonged drought conditions in many parts of Texas and Colorado last summer created increased competition and conflict between farmers, communities and energy developers, which is only likely to continue. … Even in wetter regions of the northeast United States, dozens of water permits granted to operators had to be withdrawn last summer due to low levels in environmentally vulnerable headwater streams.

Another recent study by the University of Texas looked at past and projected water use for fracking in the Barnett, Eagle Ford, and Haynesville shale plays in Texas, and found that fracking in 2011 was using more than twice as much water in the state as it was three years earlier. In Dimmit County, home to the Eagle Ford shale development in South Texas, fracking accounted for nearly a quarter of overall water consumption in 2011 and is expected to grow to a third in a few years, according to the study.

Moreover, an April report by the Western Organization of Resource Councils found that fracking is using 7 billion gallons of water a year in four western states: Wyoming, Colorado, Montana, and North Dakota. “Fracking’s growing demand for water can threaten availability of water for agriculture and western rural communities,” said Bob Leresche, a Wyoming resident and board member of the group.

The national oil and gas trade association, American Petroleum Institute, correctly notes that the “industry’s water use is small when compared to other industrial and recreational activities.” But even though hydraulic fracturing usually accounts for just 1 percent or 2 percent of states’ overall water use, the Ceres study notes that “it can be much higher at the local level, increasing competition for scarce supplies.”

New ways to frack

Not surprisingly, the oil and gas industry, along with companies drawn by the opportunity to profit from a better way to frack, are all seeking ways to reduce and even eliminate fracking’s thirst.

A new company in Texas, Alpha Reclaim Technology, sees using treated wastewater from municipal sewage-treatment plants as part of the answer. Founded in 2011, the company has signed up cities to provide about 21 million gallons of treated wastewater a day and is negotiating with oil and gas exploration and production companies to make the switch in the Eagle Ford shale play.

With regard to water use and fracking, Jeremy Osborne, the company’s vice president and general counsel, says, “We are really in a collision course here in Texas”—a course he says is accelerated by drought and population growth.

But Jillian Ryan, Alpha Reclaim Technology’s vice president for government affairs, said changing longstanding practices in the oil and gas industry can be a challenge. While the industry talks a good game about conserving water, Ryan says, “We can have a hard time getting oil and gas companies to live up to what they are talking about. Nobody wants to change. It’s easier to drill a water well where they are drilling [for oil and gas].”

Another player in this oil and gas niche is GASFRAC Energy Services, a Canadian company that says it has successfully fracked about 2,000 wells using liquid propane gas in place of water. Most of these wells are in Canada, but about 100 of them are in Texas.

Environmentalists and fracking critics, however, are alarmed at the thought of fracking with propane. Prompted by the possibility that GASFRAC would be employed in New York state and could evade a state moratorium on fracking by using propane instead of water, environmental groups, including the Sierra Club and the Natural Resources Defense Council, protested to the commissioner of the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation. Similar to water-based fracking, the groups said, fracking with propane also requires “the addition of toxic chemicals.” Because GASFRAC’s method is proprietary, the groups said in their letter that “there is little publicly-available information on the process” and the exact chemicals it uses.

Propane is also very flammable, and in two cases in Alberta in 2011, fires broke out during GASFRAC fracking operations, injuring a total of 15 workers.

Cornell University engineering professor Anthony Ingraffea is among those who are very skeptical of fracking in shale formations with propane and other alternatives to water. Ingraffea has been studying fracturing since doing research for his doctorate in the 1970s. He finds that even modern fracking practices, using millions of gallons of water per well to yield what he says is just 10 percent to 15 percent of oil and gas out, are “very inefficient and inelegant.”

Using propane or a propane-butane combination, Ingraffea says, has a positive side in that it eliminates a key problem with water-based fracking: the disposal of vast quantities of flowback water that returns to the surface after fracking is completed and is often contaminated with things such as salts and radioactivity.

But, he added, no one has yet clearly demonstrated that fracking with propane or some of the other alternatives—such as using a nitrogen or carbon dioxide gel—can compete on economics with water. Propane, he said, “is expensive and nobody really knows how much it takes to develop a typical shale gas well with a lateral that is a mile or two long.”

Oil and gas service companies such as Halliburton and Schlumberger have thrown a lot of money and bright minds at seeking efficiencies over many years, said Ingraffea, and if there was a “silver bullet you would think those companies would have hit it very hard.”

As the Ceres report concludes:

Shale energy development highlights the fact that our water resources were already vulnerable before additional demands were introduced. Regulators, water managers and ultimately all significant economic players who rely on abundant supplies of water must double-down their efforts to better manage this limited and most precious resource.

Tar Sands Mining Beginning in Utah: Why the U.S. Is Becoming Ground Zero For the Dirtiest Energy [With Slideshow]

Tara Lohan, AlterNet — Sat, 15 Jun 2013 15:35:00 -0700

The practice that has devastated parts of Canada is already underway in the U.S. and things could get a lot worse.

Editor’s Note: Tara Lohan is traveling across North America documenting communities impacted by energy development for a new AlterNet project, Hitting Home. Follow her trip on Facebook or on Twitter.

A few years ago most Americans had never heard of tar sands. Now, thanks to mounting opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline and a recent spill in Arkansas, vocabularies have grown, and so has a movement. Environmentalists have ignited a firestorm of protests over the pipeline, prompting rallies in DC and states across the country, resulting in high-profile arrests and media blitzes.

Keystone XL, which would allow more dirty oil from the environmentally ravished boreal forests of northern Alberta to flow through the U.S., has become a rallying call of sorts, a tangible way for environmentalists and other concerned residents to fight the elusive specter of climate change.

With all the focus on blocking the Obama administration’s approval of Keystone XL, the general public has mostly missed a project plugging along at 8,000 feet atop the Tavaputs Plateau in Eastern Utah (part of the ever-larger Colorado Plateau), and not far from beloved Arches and Canyonlands national parks. This fall a Canadian company named U.S Oil Sands (formerly Earth Energy Resources) leapt another legal hurdle on its multi-year journey to becoming the first large-scale tar sands mine in the U.S. Local and regional activists have been fighting the development for years, but it has somehow missed the national conversation, which is odd because the potential for tar sands and oil shale development in Utah could be massive.

“We don’t want the unconventional fuel industry to gain a foothold on the Colorado Plateau,” said Taylor McKinnon of Grand Canyon Trust. “The U.S. unconventional fuel carbon bomb is bigger than Alberta’s."

What’s at Stake

Tar sands (also known as oil sands) are rocks that have bitumen (a form of oil) mixed in with sand, clay and water. Tar sands are usually extracted by strip mining an area to remove the rock, then crushing it and using heat, water and chemicals to separate the oil, which is then diluted with other hydrocarbons in order to make it liquid enough to be transported to a refinery. (Sometimes in situ recovery is possible, where steam and chemicals are pumped into underground wells to enable the bitumen to come to the surface.) The process is energy- and water-intensive and the waste massive and dangerous, at least as it has been done in northern Alberta (see photos here).

Utah is the primary location of tar sands in the U.S., but oil shale abounds in Utah, Colorado and Wyoming. Oil shale is similar to tar sands, but when heated the rock releases kerogen, an oil-like substance. The presence of oil shale in the West is no secret—Ute Indians referred to it as “rocks that burn.” What is new, however, is the economics of bringing these unconventional fuels to market and the green light from Washington.

The federal government has approved 132,100 acres of land available for tar sands development in Utah and another 687,000 acres in Utah, Wyoming and Colorado for oil shale. (This is a scaled-back number, thanks to pressure from environmental groups, from what was first proposed in the Bush administration’s 2005 Energy Policy Act.)

U.S. Oil Sands (which did not return interview requests) has already dug its shovel into part of 32,000 acres it has leased in the Tavaputs Plateau. The company started a 200-acre test mine and last October it received sign-off from the state to continue its project following approval from the Water Quality Division. The Division’s director, Walt Baker, believed the company didn’t need a groundwater pollution permit. “He concluded that there is no groundwater to pollute in the project site, around 213 acres in the arid high country between Vernal and Moab,” reported Judy Fahys of the Salt Lake Tribune.

But the environmental group Living Rivers disagrees. Ironically, the site of the test mine is referred to on U.S. Oil Sands’ website as PR Spring, the name of a nearby freshwater spring. Additionally, Jeremy Miller reported for High Country News in July 2012 that the company actually plans to use groundwater from the site to supply the necessary water for the process. As his HCNcolleague Stephanie Paige Ogburn wrote in October 2012, “Apparently the groundwater is not too deep to drill into as a water source, but still deep enough to be immune from pollution runoff.”

The company anticipates that it will produce 2,000 barrels of oil a day once it is ramped up to full production. With a seven-year project lifespan, one estimate puts its contribution to the country’s fuel supply at six hours.

And the process won’t be easy. Miller describes what it would look like:

Heavy machinery would scour bitumen from the pit around the clock … The sand and mineral fines remaining after the oil has been removed will be combined, shoved back into the pit and covered with topsoil. But processing expands such wastes by as much as 30 percent. The overflow will be dumped into surrounding ravines—a method starkly reminiscent of Appalachia's mountaintop coal mining. And the project will create miles of light pollution, illuminating one of the country's last great "dark" regions.

The company claims the next part of the process makes its version of tar sands mining environmentally friendly by using a citrus-based solvent (although there is much disagreement about this). As Neal Clark of Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance said, “We don’t feel it’s an appropriate use of public lands to vet these unproven technologies that have wide-ranging impacts on air and water quality and habitat to companies that haven’t proven the technology whatsoever.”

But the story doesn’t end with the solvents, as Miller continues:

In order to utilize the solvent, the sands must first be sent through a series of on-site crushers. Hot water is added to the resulting slurry, generating a "froth" of oil, solvent and fine sand particles. This mixture is then passed through a series of separation towers, where the crude oil is isolated. It's then trucked to refineries in Salt Lake City for processing. Unlike conventional light crude oil, the heavy crude generated from PR Spring—like Canada's—requires extra, energy-intensive refining steps to remove impurities, such as sulfur and heavy metals, before it can be turned into anything useful.

State and local governments have largely welcomed the project and the county is quite literally paving the way, turning dirt roads into asphalt to speed things along. But opposition of another sort is mounting.

The Fight

“The kids, bless their hearts, don’t want to file lawsuits, they want to stand in front of bulldozers,” said John Weisheit of Living Rivers. “But that’s cool, I support that.”

Weisheit’s organization, along with the environmental law firm Western Resource Advocates, has been leading the charge in litigation to halt tar sands and oil shale development in the region. While they haven’t had a lot of success in court, with the U.S Oil Sands project they have managed to substantially delay development and the company is still searching for investors. Weisheit considers that a win for his side.

In May, Living Rivers, Grand Canyon Trust, Center for Biological Diversity, Sierra Club and Rocky Mountain Wild filed a 60-day notice of intent to sue the BLM. The groups contest that the government agency failed to consider the impact to endangered species that would result from making 800,000 acres of land available to tar sands and oil shale development.

“PR Springs, that is real wilderness up there,” said Weisheit. “There are roadless areas nearby, bald eagles forage up there, and some golden eagles. Sometimes I see so many I can’t believe it.”

The area is home to deer, elk, bear, and the threatened Mexican spotted owl, and it straddles two critical watersheds, the Colorado River (which 30 million people depend on) and the Green River. Nearby Desolation Canyon and its rivers give refuge to three endangered fish species and PR Springs sits just northeast of Moab, Utah, a destination town for recreation enthusiasts and nature lovers, surrounded by national and state parks of prized beauty.

Activist groups like Before It Starts are mounting education camps at the site and doing direct action, but they know PR Springs is just the tip of the iceberg. Another tar sands project at Asphalt Ridge has also been green-lighted near the town of Vernal, Utah, just to the north.

But the largest deposit of tar sands is further south in the state, in an area known as the Tar Sands Triangle, wedged between Canyonlands National Park, Glen Canyon National Recreation Area and the Dirty Devil River Watershed. In essence, it’s prime canyon country.

And tar sands development would be dwarfed by the impacts of oil shale development.

What’s the price of pursuing these unconventional fuels? Well, the BLM said it would "completely displace all other uses of the land."

Kurt Repanshek, writing in 2010 for National Parks Traveler said, according to the BLM’s own Oil Shale and Tar Sands Draft Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement, that the agency believed its plan (now slightly scaled back) would mean that the air nearby could be:

… contaminated with carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxide, sulfur dioxide and other pollutants, while air close to the site could be contaminated with benzene, toluene and formaldehyde. More than 100,000 acres of wilderness-quality land could be industrialized, construction of reservoirs would alter natural streamflow patterns, hydrocarbons and herbicides could cause 'chronic or acute toxicity' in wildlife and habitat for 20 threatened or endangered species could be lost.

And that’s coming from the agency giving the go-ahead.

Grand Canyon Trust's McKinnon said he doesn’t believe it’s possible that the already-stretched Colorado River Basin could support that level of industry without “unacceptable impacts.”

“The notion of mining climate disaster fuels in a region that is ground zero for global warming impacts is itself alarming,” said McKinnon. “It’s bad land use policy, it’s bad water policy and it’s bad public policy.”

Sailing to Save The Polynesian Islands From Climate Destruction

Imani Altemus-Williams, Waging Nonviolence — Fri, 14 Jun 2013 10:04:00 -0700

The Hōkūleʻa will sail worldwide for four years.

Two weeks ago, dozens of Hawaiians gathered at the Marine Education & Training Center in Honolulu to bid farewell to the Hōkūleʻa as she and her crew embarked on an unprecedented journey. After the group gathered in prayer aboard the Polynesian sea craft, the wind carried the double-hulled canoe onto the open sea.

The Hōkūleʻa had just departed on a voyage to circumnavigate the globe.

This four-year worldwide voyage, which launched on May 29, aims to raise awareness about climate change and its imminent threat to the Polynesian Islands, including Hawaii. Yet, the idea that a traditional Polynesian voyaging canoe has set sail to circumnavigate the globe is all the more significant because this Hawaiian tradition itself nearly went extinct.

The revival

In the 1970s, the islands underwent a “Hawaiian Renaissance.” After more than 70 years of U.S. governance, the Hawaiian people discovered renewed dignity in their ancestral heritage and cultural practices, including music, hula, language, stories, art and farming. Civil resistance also characterized this period, and young Hawaiians occupied the island of Kahoolawe, which was being used as a U.S. military training ground and bombing range.

Perhaps more than anything else, Polynesian voyaging defined the decade. Fearful of cultural extinction, a number of young Hawaiians embarked on a journey to revive the history of their islands’ discovery and the traditional navigational skills of their ancestors.

The Polynesian Voyaging Society crafted the Hōkūleʻa, a replica of the ancient Polynesian double-hulled voyaging canoes that were used thousands of years ago by the ancestors of native Hawaiians. The Hōkūleʻa, whose name means Star of Gladness in Hawaiian, is 62 feet long and 16 feet high. She has no motor and is instead steered by a long paddle and powered by two massive sails. She can travel up to 29 miles an hour in trade winds and carry nearly 20 crewmembers at a time.

After construction, the Hōkūleʻa was set to voyage 2,500 miles to Tahiti, a large island in the South Pacific Ocean. Part of the mission was to challenge the western belief that indigenous Polynesians had simply drifted to Hawaii unintentionally on ocean currents because they were incapable of navigating thousands of miles without European instruments like maps, charts, chronometers and compasses. (Another western theory, later invalidated by DNA evidence, suggested that Polynesians reached Hawaii from the Americas.)

But the Polynesian Voyaging Society couldn’t find a single Hawaiian who still knew the ancient navigation methods — called “wayfinding” — such as remembering the placement of the stars and reading the direction of the waves and swells. So the crew sought the guidance of Mau Piailug, a master navigator from the Satawal Island in the Caroline Islands of Micronesia.

The Hōkūleʻa set sail from Honolua Bay on May 1, 1976. Thirty-one days later, 20,000 elated Tahitians greeted the craft as it neared the island. The Hōkūleʻa became a symbol of Hawaiian pride, and a generation later people still felt the impact of the canoe and that first voyage.

“Now I feel proud to be from Hawaii, because I’m connected to something very real,” said current crewmember Jenna Ishii. “It’s something that has roots, and will be here long after many other technologies come and go.”

Piailug was critical to the success of Hōkūleʻa, and he taught the next generation of Hawaiian navigators the knowledge and skills necessary to continue wayfinding. Under Hawaiian direction, the Hōkūleʻa subsequently sailed to New Zealand, Tonga, the continental United States, Japan and the Satawal Island. And now she’s departed for her most ambitious voyage yet: a four-year mission to circumnavigate the globe.

Ocean Connections, Global Lessons

The Polynesian Voyaging Society spent five years planning its first-ever worldwide tour. Crewmembers and organizers explain that the trip was inspired by a sense of urgency to face the ecological and societal issues confronting Hawaii and to search around the globe for sustainable solutions. The journey is guided by one fundamental question that crewmembers will ask each community they visit: How do you care for the Earth?

The voyage begins with a five-month local sail around the Hawaiian Islands to promote environmental sustainability through the preservation of Hawaiian culture and to raise awareness about threats to Hawaii’s reefs, shorelines, deep waters and natural resources. Hōkūleʻa will then travel to familiar terrains in the Pacific before making a b-line for Africa, where she will curve around the continent’s tip before heading north toward Brazil. Next she will head to New York City, before sailing through the Panama Canal to the Galapagos Islands and finally home to Hawaii. The voyage will encompass 47,000 miles and will take the crew to 85 international ports. While the Hōkūleʻa has sailed extensively in the Pacific, once the crew reaches unfamiliar oceans, such as the Indian Ocean, it will have to rely on host countries to share their navigational knowledge.

But the Hōkūleʻa and her crew won’t be completely at the mercy of the open oceans. A modern-day escort vessel named Hikianalia will join the voyage. This second craft looks like a traditional double-hulled canoe, but each of her hulls holds an electric motor powered by photovoltaic solar panels.

To members of the crew, the Hikianalia is the modern expression of a Polynesian voyaging canoe, and the two canoes represent the balance between modern technology and traditional respect for the earth and its survival.

Ishii explained this dynamic. “ Hōkūleʻa and Hikianalia are how you can learn to live in both worlds,” she said. “Respect the technology and science that we need to know to get this world back on course, but constantly have a foot in the past to know where you came from and the knowledge that has been passed down for generations that you cannot forget.”

The worldwide voyage seeks to unify communities linked by the ocean and to celebrate diverse navigation traditions. The trip is particularly focused on establishing alliances with indigenous leaders and elders from around the world. The crew is comprised of nearly 300 members representing 11 Pacific nations, including Micronesia, Japan and Alaska. Crewmembers will rotate each month, and Hawaiian airlines are sponsoring the flights to and from each destination.

Worldwide voyage leaders are particularly concerned with training the next generation of navigators, which is why at least 40 percent of the crew is under the age of 30. “If they don’t pass on everything they’ve learned, it’s another cycle of extinction,” said crewmember Ishii. To keep this history alive, a documentation team from Ōiwi TV, the Native Hawaiian television station, will also travel on the Hikianlia and collect and share the stories of communities working on environmental stewardship, cultural perpetuation and education.

For hundreds of years colonial forces have been circumnavigating the globe, arriving at the shores of — and then conquering — lands of indigenous communities from Hawaii to New York City. In the 1970s Hōkūleʻa became a form of local resistance against this colonization. Now, this worldwide voyage seeks to transcend local resistance as she arrives at shores around the world to unite local indigenous communities in their efforts to Malama Honua — to care for the Earth.

The circumnavigation of the globe by colonial forces is not only a story of conquering land. It also reflects the interconnected relationship between the land and the sea — a delicate balance that is increasingly at risk as climate change and global warming lead to rising sea levels.

“The ocean is only a mirror of the well-being of the land,” said Pwo navigator Nainoa Thompson. “What happens in the ocean comes from the land. What we do on the land, we do to the sea.”

Police Trained to Treat Keystone XL Protesters as 'Terrorists' (View TransCanada's PowerPoints)

Alyssa Figueroa, AlterNet — Thu, 13 Jun 2013 10:00:00 -0700

Peaceful environmental protesters framed as criminals? Guess who’s scared of people power…

It’s often difficult to gauge just how much fear activists instill in the powers that be. But on Wednesday, environmental activists protesting the Keystone XL pipeline saw firsthand how much TransCanada, the corporation in charge of the pipeline, is shaking in its boots.

Bold Nebraska, a grassroots landowner advocacy group, obtained TransCanada's presentation slides (below) via a Freedom of Information Act request to the Nebraska State Patrol. These slides revealed that TransCanada provided training to both federal and local police forces on how to crack down on environmental activists, even going so far as to train them to arrest the activists under anti-terrorism statutes.

Lauren Regan, legal coordinator for Tar Sands Blockade and executive director of the Civil Liberties Defense Center said, “This is clear evidence of the collusion between TransCanada and the federal government assisting local police to unlawfully monitor and harass political protestors.”

According to a 350.org press release the slides were presented last month in Nebraska, althought they date back to December, 2012. They specifically call out Occupy Pipe, Occupy Houston, STOP, Rainforest Action Network and Tar Sands Blockade in their presentations, which create an overall narrative that the activists are criminals and terrorists who need to be stopped.

One slide even has photos and descriptions of the “professional organizers” in a “most wanted” fashion:

Scott Parkin, an organizer at Rising Tide North America and campaigner at the Rainforest Action Network, who was listed on this slide, told AlterNet: “It’s pretty appalling. … They want to paint us as terrorists and make people scared of us.”

To the contrary, Parkin said, the activists—some of whom are grandparents— are not a bunch of crooks working underground. They are very upfront about their goals and work withlandowners.

The slides describe the movement as “lead by professionals and organized.” They report that Tar Sands Blockade “appears to be well-funded” by “Large and small donation from individuals.” Under a slide titled, “Protestor Tactics,” TransCanada states the activists “suddenly show up, driving to the entrance of site. Could be five or fifteen or more in several vehicles.”

Under a slide titled “Protestor Motivations,” TransCanada implies that these activists are just protesting because that’s what they do. One bullet point simply quotes an activist saying: “I have been an activist for fifty years. I am seventy,” obviously side-stepping the activist’s true motivations for wanting to stop the Keystone XL pipeline.

Further slides list the activists’ “criminal activity,” to which Tar Sands Blockade responded on their site:

Although TransCanada’s presentation to authorities contains information about property destruction, sabotage, and booby traps, police in Texas and Oklahoma have never alleged, accused, or charged Tar Sands Blockade activists of any such behaviors. Since August 2012, Tar Sands Blockade has carried out dozens of successful nonviolent direct actions to physically halt construction of the Keystone XL pipeline in Texas and Oklahoma. All of these acts, as well as every pipeline protest in Nebraska, have maintained strict commitments to nonviolence.

Another slide lists all of the laws the activists can supposedly be found violating, and a presentation suggests that the activists are planning “terrorist acts,” and can thus be charged via anti-terrorism statutes:

According to the presentation, there are eight signs of terrorism, including “surveillance,” “suspicious persons” and “terrorism funding.”

Ron Seifert, a spokesperson for Tar Sands Blockade who was pictured in the slideshow said: “Try as TransCanada might to slander Tar Sands Blockade and our growing grassroots movement, we know who the real criminals are. … The real criminals are those profiting from this deadly tar sands pipeline by endangering families living along the route and pumping illegal levels of air toxins into fence-line communities.”

In some ways, TransCanada’s presentations are a testament to the strength and significance of the activists' resistance. It’s evident that the corporate powers are frightened by the power of the people. After all, TransCanada saw these activists and their common, non-violent protest tactics as a threat. For instance, under slides titled “Incident History,” TransCanada lists “protest/demonstrations,” “photography,” “social media organization,” “banners, signs” and other tactics as threatening to their pipeline. And under a slide titled "Potential Security Concerns," TransCanada lists the various activism and media attention surrounding their projects:

“Most of the people I’ve talked to are very much like, ‘Right on!’ ‘This is a badge of honor’ or that sort of thing,” Parkin told AlterNet.

He added that he still feels troubled by the misinformation in TransCanada's presentations:

“I actually find it a little disturbing to know that if I went to Nebraska or around some of these sites or an activist camp or an event or something like that, that law enforcement can just come up and just grab me based on what they’ve seen in these slideshows.”

Fortunately, the grassroots resistance to the Keystone XL pipeline continues to grow. TransCanada is currently digging up defective segments of the new pipeline that failed inspections, and it has been reported that there are at least 40 “anomalies” along the 60-mile stretch of the line in East Texas.

Parkin said that ultimately the presentations reveal their grassroots movement is working.

“I think it shows that it’s really effective, and it’s only getting bigger,” he said.

The following are TransCanada's presentations:

TransCanada Presentation on Security to Local Law Enforcement (Part 1 of 3)

TransCanada Presentation on Security to Local Law Enforcement (Part 2 of 3)

TransCanada Presentation on Security to Local Law Enforcement (Part 3 of 3)

TransCanada Potential Penal Code Charges for Illegal Protest Action Presentation

Nebraska Information Analysis Center meeting on Keystone XL pipeline

TransCanada presentation to FBI on pipeline projects

In Praise of Darkness

Rebecca Solnit, Tom Dispatch — Thu, 13 Jun 2013 08:51:00 -0700

What darkness and the far north have to do with creativity and empathy.

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One summer some years ago, on a peninsula jutting off another peninsula off the west coast of Iceland, I lived among strangers and birds. The birds were mostly new species I got to know a little, the golden plovers plaintively dissembling in the grass to lead intruders away from their nests, the oystercatchers who flew overhead uttering unearthly oscillating cries, the coastal fulmars, skuas, and guillemots, and most particularly the arctic terns. The impeccable whiteness of their feathers, the sharpness of their scimitar wings, the fierceness of their cries, and the steepness of their dives were all enchanting.
Terns were once called sea swallows for their deeply forked tails and grace in the air, and in Latin, arctic terns were named sterna paradisaea by a pietist Danish cleric named Erik Pontoppidan, at the end of a turbulent career. It’s not clear why in 1763 he called the black-capped, white-feathered arctic terns sterna paradisaea: birds -- or terns -- of paradise. He could not have known about their extraordinary migration, back in the day when naturalists -- and Pontoppidan himself in his book on Norway -- thought swallows buried themselves in the mud in winter and hibernated, rather than imagining they and other birds flew far south to other climes.
Of all living things, arctic terns migrate farthest and live in the most light and least darkness. They fly tens of thousands of miles a year as they relocate from farthest north to farthest south. When they are not nesting, they rarely touch ground and live almost constantly in flight, like albatrosses, like their cousins the sooty terns who roam above the equatorial seas for years at a time without touching down. Theirs is a paradise of endless light and endless effort. The lives of angels must be like this.
The far north is an unearthly earth, where much of what those of us in temperate zones were told is universal is not true. Everyone walks on water, which is a solid. In winter, you can build palaces out of it, or houses out of snow. Ice is blue. Snow insulates. Water crystallizes into floating mountains that destroy whatever collides with them. Many other things turn hard as rock in the cold. Nothing decays, and so time stops for the dead, if not the living. Cold is stability and warmth can be treacherous.

Trees dwindle; shrubs cling to the ground; and further north nothing remains of the plant kingdom but low grasses, diminutive flowers, mosses, and lichens hidden beneath the snow part of the year; and nearly every species but the reindeer and some of the summer birds is carnivorous. In winter, light can seem to shine upward from the white ground more than from the dark sky where the sun doesn’t rise or rises for an hour or two a day. And at the poles themselves, there are not 365 days per year but one long night and one long stretch of light, and the sun rises once in the spring and sets once in the fall.
Their opposite is the equator, where every day and every night of the year is exactly twelve hours long. The further north or south you go, the longer summer days and winter nights get. In Iceland, each day of spring was several minutes longer than the one before, so that in May the days went from nearly 17 to 20 hours long, and by June there is no true darkness, no night. The sun dipped low around midnight or after and there were spectacular sunsets that melted into sunrises, because the sun never went entirely away.
That summer among the terns, I lived at latitude 65, about as far north as Fairbanks, Alaska, and one degree south of the Arctic Circle. If you go farther north, to, say, the town of Longyearbyen in the Norwegian Arctic at latitude 78, which I later visited, the sun rises in late April and stays above the horizon until nearly the end of August, when sunset finally comes -- a few minutes before sunrise. There, winter is a night as long as that summer day, running from the end of October until the middle of February. The twenty-four-hour cycle of day and night we think of as normal and daily comes as a rush of rapidly changing days and nights, flickering like a strobe, between the great day and the great night that each lasts 1,000 hours or more.
Long ago, I had read about the white nights of St. Petersburg in Russia, at only 59 degrees north, and I had once spent a couple of weeks in the Canadian wilderness at that latitude near midsummer, when night was just a blush of darkness that generally began and ended while I was asleep in my tent. I had always wanted to see the white nights farther north, but actually living through them was a little disorienting.
In Praise of Darkness
Sometimes during that summer when the sky was often gray but never black, I would think that a task had to be done before darkness and then realize that there would be no more darkness while I was there, and it didn’t matter so much when I rose, when I slept, when I traveled. For me day and night were time itself, and I missed the rhythm and structure they provide. I missed stars. Darkness no longer shut me in: I shut light out to sleep. It was as though I had entered a landscape that itself never slept, never dreamed, that never let up the rational alertness of daytime, the light of interrogation and analysis.
The sensuality of night had never been so clear to me, darkness descending like velvet to wrap around you and enclose you in its black cocoon, to take you to your other self and others. In darkness dreams awaken and dreamers merge, which might be how passion becomes love and how making love begets progeny of all natures and forms. Merging is dangerous, at least to the boundaries and definition of the self. Darkness is generative, and generation, biological and artistic both, requires this amorous engagement with the unknown, this entry into the realm where you do not quite know what you are doing and what will happen next.
Creation is always in the dark because you can only do the work of making by not quite knowing what you’re doing, by walking into darkness, not staying in the light. Ideas emerge from edges and shadows to arrive in the light, and though that’s where they may be seen by others, that’s not where they’re born. But darkness is a pejorative in English, and the term has often carried emotional, moral, and religious overtones as has its opposite: the children of light, snowy angels, fair maidens, and white knights. “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that,” said the dark-skinned Martin Luther King Jr., but sometimes love is darkness; sometimes the glare is what needs to be extinguished. Turn off the lights and come to bed.
When you spend time in the desert, you come to love shadow, shade, and darkness, the respite they give to the menacing blaze of day that burns you out and dries you up. Heat is the desert as predator, just as cold is the Arctic’s biggest animal. Desert light is fierce, and at midday it flattens everything into a harsh solid, but early and late in the day, light is golden and every crevice and fold and protrusion of the landscape is thrown into the high relief of light and shadow. At those times day and night intertwine like dancers, like lovers, and shadows are as powerful a presence as the things that cast them, or more so, growing and growing until the sun disappears below the horizon and darkness spreads like water on the land.
Journey to the Center
There was only one dark place left in Iceland that summer, or so it seemed to me, and I went there again and again. Elín Hansdóttir, a young artist who had been instrumental in the chain of coincidences that brought me to Iceland, had made a labyrinth titled Path. In a big room in Iceland’s National Gallery, with the help of two meticulous carpenters, she built a zigzag route of Sheetrock that gave off that material’s dusty clean aroma. One person at a time entered Path, and a pair of watchers in the outer gallery monitored entries and exits and occasionally went in for a rescue, like lifeguards.
When you stepped in from the daylight and the door closed behind you, the space seemed to be absolutely dark and then your eyes adjusted to the faint, faint light. You could move forward when you were blind or wait until you could see, but placing a hand on one side of the walls helped you travel too. The path turned at sharp angles, so that you knew that you were being turned around and around, and you lost track of the distance that you were going.
The light that leaked through the intentional, careful cracks in the walls and ceiling was faintly lavender blue -- it came from fluorescent tubes -- and it streamed across the space in strange ways. It was easy to believe that what was dark was solid, what was light was spaciousness into which you could move, but reality as you bumped into it was often the other way around, with open blackness and hard pale surfaces.
Your expectations reversed, you moved deeper into the labyrinth, knowing now that you did not know what was solid, what was space you could occupy, but would have to test it, over and over. Path was a space in which you perfected the art of not knowing where you were, of finding out one literal step at a time. Did the path fork? Or was there only one route? How far did it go? Was the way out the same as the way in? All this would have to be found with the hands, eyes, and feet as you traveled.
At the end, the walls began to press together and it was as dark as it had been at that first moment you stepped in and closed the door behind yourself. And then you could go no farther. It seemed as though it ought to feel claustrophobic, but I found in it an embrace of darkness, a destination, a handmade night. There and back again took me 10 or 15 minutes by the clock, but the time inside had no such quantifiable measure. It was time apart, symbolic time, a slow journey to the heart of the unknown and the unknowable. I kept coming back all summer, seven times in all, once for so long the attendants grew concerned. I felt at home there, more myself than anywhere else in Iceland, somehow. Jules Verne’s novel about Iceland was calledJourney to the Center of the Earth, and this felt like such a journey, or such a center.
A labyrinth is an ancient device that compresses a journey into a small space, winds up a path like thread on a spool. It contains beginning, confusion, perseverance, arrival, and return. There at last the metaphysical journey of your life and your actual movements are one and the same. You may wander, may learn that in order to get to your destination you must turn away from it, become lost, spin about, and then only after the way has become overwhelming and absorbing, arrive, having gone the great journey without having gone far on the ground.
In this it is the opposite of a maze, which has not one convoluted way but many ways and often no center, so that wandering has no cease or at least no definitive conclusion. A maze is a conversation; a labyrinth is an incantation or perhaps a prayer. In a labyrinth you’re lost in that you don’t know the twists and turns, but if you follow them you get there; and then you reverse your course.
The end of the journey through the labyrinth is not at the center, as is commonly supposed, but back at the threshold again: the beginning is also the real end. That is the home to which you return from the pilgrimage, the adventure. The unpraised edges and margins matter too, because it’s not ultimately a journey of immersion but emergence.
Paths, Empaths, Journeys Into and Toward, By Touch and By Ear
If Path was a book, it was about not knowing, about being lost, and about darkness, the darkness of the deep interior, a book you read with your feet. Anatomists long ago named the windings of the inner ear, whose channels provide both hearing and balance, the labyrinth. The name suggests that if the labyrinth is the passage through which sound enters the mind, then we ourselves bodily enter labyrinths as though we were sounds on the way to being heard by some great unknown presence. To walk this path is to be heard, and to be heard is a great desire of the majority of us, but to be heard by whom, by what? To be a sound traveling toward the mind -- is that another way to imagine this path, this journey, the unwinding of this thread?
Who hears you? We live inside each other’s thoughts and works. You build yourself out of the materials at hand and those you seek out and choose, you build your beliefs, your alliances, your affections, your home, though some of us have far more latitude than others in all those things. You digest an idea or an ethic as though it was bread, and like bread it becomes part of you. Out of all this comes your contribution to the making of the world, your sentences in the ongoing interchange. The tragedy of the imprisoned, the unemployed, the disenfranchised, and the marginalized is to be silenced in this great ongoing conversation, this symphony that is another way to describe the world.
To hear is to let the sound wander all the way through the labyrinth of your ear; to listen is to travel the other way to meet it. It’s not passive but active, this listening. It’s as though you retell each story, translate it into the language particular to you, fit it into your cosmology so you can understand and respond, and thereby it becomes part of you. The word empathy originally meant feeling into, and to empathize is to reach out to meet the data that comes through the labyrinths of the senses. To enter into, we say, as though another person’s life was also a place you could travel to.
Kindness, compassion, generosity, are often talked about as though they’re purely emotional virtues, but they are also and maybe first of all imaginative ones. You see someone get hurt -- maybe they get insulted or they’re just very tired -- and you feel for them. You take the information your senses deliver and interpret it, often in terms of your own experience, until it becomes vivid to you. Or you work harder and study them to imagine the events you don’t witness, the suffering that is not on the surface.
It’s easier to imagine the experience of people most like you and nearest you -- your best friend, the person who just slipped on the ice. Through imagination and representations -- films, printed stories, second-hand accounts -- you travel into the lives of people far away. This imaginative entering into is best at the particular, since you can imagine being the starving child but not the region of a million starving people. Sometimes, though, one person’s story becomes the point of entry to larger territories.
This identification is almost instinctual in many circumstances. Even some animals do it; babies cry in sympathy with each other, or in distress at the sound of distress. But to cry because someone cries or desire because someone desires is not quite to care about someone else. There are people whose response to the suffering of others is to become upset and demand consolation themselves.
Empathy means that you travel out of yourself a little or expand. Recognizing the reality of another's existence is the imaginative leap that is the birth of empathy, a word invented by a psychologist interested in visual art. The word is only slightly more than a century old, though the words sympathy, kindness, pity, compassion, fellow-feeling, and others covered the same general ground before Edward Titchener coined it in 1909. It was a translation of the German word Einfuhlung, or feeling into, as though the feeling itself reached out.
The root word is path, from the Greek word for passion or suffering, from which we also derive pathos and pathology and sympathy. It’s a coincidence that empathy is built from a homonym for the Old English path, as in a trail. Or a dark labyrinth named Path. Empathy is a journey you travel, if you pay attention, if you care, if you desire to do so. Up close you witness suffering directly, though even then you may need words to know that this person has terrible pains in her joints or that one recently lost his home. Suffering far away reaches you through art, through images, recordings, and narratives; the information travels toward you and you meet it halfway, if you meet it.
Few if any of us will travel like arctic terns in endless light, but in the dark we find ourselves and each other, if we reach out, if we keep going, if we listen, if we go deeper.

Can Utah's Beautiful Wildlands Survive an Energy Grab?

Tara Lohan, AlterNet — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 07:11:00 -0700

A town known for its astounding natural beauty is in the cross hairs of energy developers.

Editor’s Note: Tara Lohan is traveling across North America documenting communities impacted by energy development for a new AlterNet project, Hitting Home. You can follow the trip on Facebook or follow Tara on Twitter.

Utah always blows my mind — the red rocks, the canyons, the rivers, the mountains and ... the love of industry, the dirtier the better.

The first stop on our Hitting Home tour was Moab, Utah — a town surrounded by the gorgeous Arches National Park, Canyonlands National Park, Fisher Towers, Dead Horse State Park, and tons of “undesignated” wildlands of astounding beauty.

In town we also saw a tailings pile of uranium mining waste; talked with local residents concerned about impacts from a new plan to fly helicopter tours over the area; we trekked up into the Book Cliffs outside of Moab and saw a test mine for what may be the first U.S. tar sands mine; we saw oil pumpers adjacent to national parks and gas being flared from towers along breathtaking ridges; and we met people who were fighting to protect their land, and the local watershed, from encroaching drilling operations.

In Nearby Dutch Flats, a company is accepting wastewater from fracking operations across the Colorado border, and neighboring Green River has plans for a nuclear power plant and perhaps also a refinery that could process the tar sands coming down from the Book Cliffs.

Utah has always been friendly to energy development — and it has also always been a haven for those who enjoy wild places and wildlife. It’s unclear how long those two value sets can coexist as energy development grows and natural resources like water and clean air grow scarcer.

Stay tuned for a story about tars sand and oil shale development in Utah.

How the Transition Movement Is Spreading to Towns Across America

Jessica Stites, In These Times — Tue, 11 Jun 2013 15:15:00 -0700

Transition's focus on resilient communities finds a middle ground between the 'drop in the bucket' of personal action and the depressing inertia of government.

When I set out to investigate the appeal of Transition, a sustainability movement that has spread to 1,105 towns in 43 countries over the past eight years, I started with what I thought was a basic question: What are “Transition Towns” transitioning to?

“Resilience,” I was told. “What does that mean?” I asked, thinking vaguely of steel. “The ability to absorb shocks to a system!” was the reply. Well, yes, but …? Pressed for details, Nina Winn, who runs a Transition initiative at the Institute of Cultural Affairs in Chicago, said, “I don’t think there’s a conclusion. Like when a person’s trying to self-improve, it’s a constant growth. Our communities would grow to be a lot more intimate. We wouldn’t be hesitant to ask for that cup of sugar or tomato. The streets would be narrower instead of expanding; there would be fresh produce on every corner that was grown just down the street. You would see people on the street because of that—because where there’s food, there’s people.”

Such bucolic but fuzzy visions are typical of Transition, which is more about shifting paradigms than prescribing solutions. With an it’ll-take-shape-as-we-go ethos, most Transition Town websites sport a “cheerful disclaimer”: “Just in case you were under the impression that Transition is a process defined by people who have all the answers, you need to be aware of a key fact. … Transition is a social experiment on a massive scale.”

On a basic level, however, the experiment seeks to address what founder Rob Hopkins sees as a source of frustration in the environmental movement: Personal action feels like a drop in the bucket, while governments often move at a glacial pace.

“Until now, there’s been the things you can do at home on your own—changing your lightbulbs and sharing your lofts and things—and then there’s everything else that someone else is meant to do: the sort of mythical ‘they,’” says Hopkins. “Transition is what’s in the middle, what you can do with the people on your street.”

The seed for Transition came in 2004 when Hopkins, a young teacher with a degree in environmental quality and resource management, encountered the concept of peak oil: the theory that easy-to-reach oil will run out at a specific date—some say 2020—precipitating a rapid decline in oil availability followed by the collapse of civilization as we know it. At the time, Hopkins was teaching a permaculture course at the Kinsale College of Further Education, an alternative school on Ireland’s southern coast. Permaculture is another one of these concepts that, as Hopkins notes, is “notoriously difficult to explain in two minutes in the pub,” but it’s most commonly described as an ecological design movement that sees nature in terms of interlocking systems. Alarmed by peak oil, Hopkins assigned his students to apply the principles of permaculture to the problem.

The result was a concrete plan to make Kinsale dramatically less fossil-fuel dependent, with recommendations such as a green buildings officer and a horse-and-cart taxi. The Kinsale Town Council enthusiastically adopted the plan, and the principles underlying it became the precepts of Transition, as outlined in Hopkins’ 2008 Transition Handbook: From Oil Dependency to Local Resilience and as adopted by Transition Towns worldwide.

But it would be a mistake to think that becoming a Transition Town means setting off on a clear-cut path to energy independence. From permaculture, the movement has inherited a non-linear, bottom-up approach—even the original 12 “steps” outlined in Hopkins’ handbook have been renamed “ingredients.” If the Transition movement has a sine qua non, however, it is the belief that communities must become more resilient in the face of three catastrophic threats: peak oil, global warming and economic instability. Whether the movement means to avert or adapt to future disasters is ambiguous; when I ask, Transition members tend to respond, “Both!” as though I have just recited their favorite koan.

Practically, this means preparing towns to better survive sudden shortfalls of such necessities as food, oil, water or money. These preparations take many forms, some infrastructural—such as solar energy programs and local economic initiatives—others interpersonal, like the “heart and soul” groups that encourage people to help each other in times of need and open their minds to new solutions.

Totnes, England, declared the first official Transition Town in 2006, offers perhaps the most fully realized example. The town, with a population of 7,400, boasts nearly 30 Transition projects and sub-projects. Some are small-scale, like nut-tree planting and a free “bike doctor,” while others are more ambitious, like an incubator for sustainable businesses and a 305-pageEnergy Descent Action Plan to cut the town’s energy usage in half by 2030. The movement is enthusiastically backed by the city mayor and the town councilors, one of whom attests that “the [Energy Descent Action Plan] has filtered into everyone’s plans for everything, so that’s had a major impact.” A much-heralded neighborhood-level project has been Transition Streets, which brought residents together, block by block, to support each other in decreasing their home energy use through improvements like insulation and solar panels. On average, each of the 550 participating households cut its annual carbon use by 1.3 tons and its annual energy bill by £570 (about $883).

Hopkins stresses, however, that the Transition movement is not in the business of stamping out cookie-cutter copies of Totnes. Transition spreads primarily through serendipity. One member likens it to a mycelium network, a fungus with underground roots that can sprout new shoots miles away. In effect, this means that someone—often with a background in sustainability—stumbles across Transition online or in print and decides to start a local chapter.

While guidance is available from umbrella support groups such as Transition U.S. and the U.K.-based Transition Network, the movement is intended to mutate as it grows. “We designed it with a simple set of principles and tools and sort of set it off, and it keeps popping up in the most incredible, surprising places, in the most incredible, surprising ways,” says Hopkins. “When there’s Transition happening in Brazil, it feels like a Brazilian thing, it doesn’t feel like an English imported thing.”

Indeed, the organizers of Brazil’s Transition movement say that two of the three core principles—peak oil and climate change—don’t resonate strongly with the Brazilian public, so Transition trainings focus more on “assuring education and health for all, protecting biodiversity and enhancing autonomy of traditional (indigenous or not) local communities.” In Brasilândia, one of the slums of São Paulo, Transition primarily fosters social enterprise projects; it has given birth to a community bakery and a business turning old advertising banners into bags.

In parts of Europe, Transition has had to respond to the pressing needs of communities decimated by the ongoing Eurozone crisis. When the city of Coin, Spain, went bankrupt and decided to privatize the water, Coin En Transicion gathered 3,000 signatures to convince the city to squash the plan. Now the movement is working with the city government to design a regional water plan grounded in principles of sustainability and resilience.

In Portugal, where unemployment is at 16.9 percent and climbing, the Transition Town of Portalegre has drawn inspiration from ajujeda, an ancient rural practice of trading chores in the fields. This month, Portalegre em Transição will meet to figure out how to translate the principle of ajujeda into a functioning gift economy, allowing those whose skills are not being used (for instance, the unemployed) to share them with those whose needs are not being met.

Across the pond

In making the leap across the Atlantic to the United States, where more than 139 Transition Towns and 200 unofficial “mullers” have sprouted, Transition has also taken its own, distinct path.

Most of the Transition towns in the United States have popped up in places one might expect: relatively moneyed, green, hippie enclaves like Boulder, Colo. (the first official U.S. Transition Town); Sebastopol, Calif.; Northampton, Mass.; and Woodstock, N.Y. None have taken root so far in any conservative strongholds, although there are a number of urban initiatives, in Boston, Houston, Los Angeles and Cleveland, to name a few.

As in the United Kingdom, members of the U.S. Transition movement tend to split up into working groups around specific projects. A common one is an “emergency preparedness” group, which devises things like phone trees and alternative heating sources for use in the event of disaster. “Yard share” working groups match would-be gardeners to landowners willing to lend a patch of fertile ground. “Heart and soul” or “inner transition” working groups stress psychological and spiritual transformation, drawing on the teachings of thinkers such as Buddhist deep ecologist Joanna Macy. “Reskilling” working groups offer trainings in all manner of practical pre-industrial skills, from cheesemaking to animal husbandry to knot-tying to knitting.

Of course, Transition is not the only sustainability game in town. Wherever it goes, and especially in cities, it enters a terrain thick with environmental non-profits and local government initiatives. More than 1,060 mayors have signed the U.S. Conference of Mayors Climate Protection Agreement, a pledge to meet the goal of the Kyoto Protocol (the United States was one of only four countries not to join) to reduce carbon emissions below 1990 levels. Some cities have gone beyond that: Last year, Chicago drafted a sustainability plan for the year 2015 that reads something like Totnes’s Energy Descent Action Plan—a laundry list of goals such as improving citywide energy efficiency by 5 percent and decreasing water use by 2 percent (14 million gallons a day). To get there, the city has launched numerous projects, such as eco-friendly overhauls of city buses, a “rails-to-trails conversion” of a disused train line into a park (modeled on New York City’s High Line), and a Sustainable Backyards Program that urges residents to install compost bins and rainwater collectors.

Given this abundance of initiatives, many Transition movements, especially in cities, take on a networking role to connect existing sustainability projects. Transition Pittsburgh’s mission is to offer “resources—such as educators, movie screenings and licenses, and a library of shared knowledge—to various local initiatives, as well as a city-wide community and some of our own projects.” Chicago’s Transition chapter—called Accelerate 77 after the division of the city into 77 unofficial communities by social scientists at the University of Chicago—set out by creating a dense map of the more than 800 sustainability projects underway in Chicago, which are remarkably evenly spaced throughout the areas of poverty and wealth that stratify the city. It hosted a “Share Fair” in September for the various groups to connect with each other, followed by three neighborhood gatherings on Chicago’s South, West and North Sides to connect with residents.

I asked Ryan Wilson of the nonprofit Center for Neighborhood Technology (CNT), a sustainability “think-and-do tank” that participated in the Share Fair, whether he thinks Transition has anything to add to Chicago’s wealth of sustainability initiatives. “It was helpful to learn what other projects are out there—maybe more helpful for some of the smaller groups,” he says. “The Transition folks—I like the people. I like their energy.”

This jives with Hopkins’ thinking on Transition, which has progressed from seeing “resilience” as a strictly environmental process to a more social one: “We have all the technologies to [achieve sustainability],” he says, “but we don’t have the social technologies to make it happen.”

The art of hosting

Transition’s freewheeling structure, however, does mean that certain problems—or “challenges”—seem to crop up frequently. As with any volunteer-driven movement, members describe burnout and lack of accountability. After a stage of initial enthusiasm, projects can fall dormant. More successful Transition Towns often have paid staff. After observing that most initiatives “were struggling with an all-volunteer leadership team,” Transition Sarasota founder Don Hall decided to raise the money to pay himself as a full-time organizer, cobbling together his salary from “a mix of event and workshop fees, donations, local business sponsorships and grants.” In many cities, Transition has been adopted by non-profits that provide paid staff, like Chicago’s Institute of Cultural Affairs, a 50-yearold organization dedicated to sustainability and social change, and Jamaica Plain’s Institute for Policy Studies, the Boston branch of aprogressive, multi-issue D.C. think tank.

The Transition movement also grapples with the challenges of non-hierarchical, collective leadership. When I contacted Transition Sebastopol, in California, a longstanding, apparently thriving Transition town with a busy events calendar, I was surprised to learn that all was not well. A dispute in September had put the central Working Group Council on hold, although several working groups—an elders salon, the “heart and soul” group—are chugging along independently. Former working group member Julia Bystrova ascribes the blow-up to a lack of conflict-resolution mechanisms. She hopes that a fresh team will take over and resuscitate the group.

Hopkins is quick to cop to these pitfalls, and Transition is good at tapping into existing knowledge bases to fix problems. Transition U.S. has partnered with an organization called The Art of Hosting to offer facilitation trainings and will begin hosting regional courses on “effective groups” starting in September. Transition U.K. offers Thrive workshops for the same purpose, and ecofeminist and spiritual activist Starhawk gave a workshop in Totnes last month about clear communication and constructive critique in collective decision-making.

Another common concern about Transition, levied from both within and without, is that it is a movement of “white hippies.” While the definition of “hippie” is open to debate, each of the half dozen Transition towns I surveyed in the U.S. indeed lamented a lack of diversity. In addition to being predominantly white, participants in several towns mentioned that their initiative was made up primarily of older women.

While many in the Transition movement said they were working to increase diversity, by far the most impressive effort I encountered is being staged by the Boston branch of IPS’ Jamaica Plain New Economy Transition (JP NET), which has hired an organizer to help meet this challenge. Carlos Espinoza-Toro, a Peruvian immigrant with a master’s in city planning from MIT, aims to identify spaces where different demographics intersect—farmers’ markets, festivals—as well as to find people like himself who enjoy serving as cross-cultural bridges. But he’s going beyond mixed-race spaces to foster Transition in the heart of Jamaica Plain’s Latino community. A series of IPA-hosted meetings in Spanish (with simultaneous English translation) encourages residents to talk about how they are weathering environmental and economic crises. Espinoza-Toro’s bilingual fliers for the first meeting read:

Us Latinos have adapted to economic crises in our countries and in the US for many years. And we have always prevailed! We are creative, resourceful and entrepreneurial. Currently in the US, MA and JP we are experiencing a crisis that challenges our capacity of adaptation. Work opportunities are scarce, rent keeps going up, it becomes more difficult to afford a healthy diet and take the T, the quality of education in our public schools diminishes. …We invite you to share how you are adapting to this crisis or how you have adapted to previous crises. Tell us your stories of adaptation. We could transform your effort into a neighborhood effort with great impact in JP.

Espinoza-Toro anticipates that the needs of Jamaica Plain’s Latino immigrant community may be very different from the white, middle-class needs that have prompted JP NET’s existing programs, such as garden shares and urban orchards. “Folks in the Latino community may say, ‘Well, we cannot do our own gardening if we are getting evicted from our homes,’ ” he says. JP NET has one program underway to address housing issues, a community land trust called Pueblo, but Espinoza-Toro estimates that it is years from fruition thanks to high property costs in the rapidly gentrifying neighborhood. He hopes other ideas will emerge from the meetings.

Outside of urban areas, the barriers that limit the reach of Transition can be subtler than ethnicity. In New York state’s Hudson Valley and other agricultural areas around the United States, Transition is one of many sustainability initiatives to run up against a cultural divide between traditional farmers and those who practice newer, more sustainable methods like organic, permacultural and biodynamic farming.

“You have organic farmers who are pretty disdainful and smug, and traditional farmers who are kind of threatened,” says Maria Reidelbach, an artist and member of Transition Marbletown, N.Y., who found herself spanning both sides when she partnered with a 177-year-old local farm to create a mini-golf course featuring entirely edible plants (along with the world’s third-largest garden gnome, “Gnome Chomsky”). “When the traditional farmers adopted machinery and pesticides in the 20th century, the yield increased incredibly, and all of a sudden they were able to feed so many more people with the same amount of land and less help,” says Reidelbach. “To them, that’s great. And then we come along 30 years later and start telling them that they are feeding people poison.”

Reidelbach thinks Transition Marbletown has gone some way toward bridging this divide. The movement, she says, managed to “rope in” the local growers’ association to cosponsor a “Common Ground Celebration” last fall. At a farmers’ market, growers mingled and tasted each other’s crops, and farmers of all stripes were recognized with “Signs of Sustainability Awards.”

“There’s a value to the farmers listening to each other, humanizing each other,” says Reidelbach. “Then they are much less likely to dis each others’ methods, modus operandi and motives. I think everybody’s got to get down off their high horses. That’s one of the things that Transition enables.”

Modest expectations, high spirits

Asked if he eventually envisions Transition scaling up and being adopted by regional or national governments, Hopkins assents cautiously, explaining that the goal would be for government to better enable local projects (for instance, by making laws more friendly to small-scale farming). He also hopes that Transition will hit a tipping point at which new solutions seem possible—where, for instance, local governments don’t feel that the only solution to economic hardship is to try to attract large corporations in a deregulatory race to the bottom.

Espinoza-Toro says that he chooses Transition over other forms of organizing because he is inspired by the movement’s tangibility. “What I find most fruitful and rewarding about my work here is that I’m dealing with folks face-to-face in order to tackle some of these issues,” he says.

Again and again, for Transitioners, it seems to come back to that social aspect. “Between you and me, I don’t know if we’re going to solve the world’s problems,” says Reidelbach. “[But] the underlying ethos is that the process needs to be fun enough to be worth doing anyway. I love that about it. There’s a bit of anarchy, which is wonderful. People who are attracted to it tend to be upbeat, optimistic, joyous people.

“I don’t see anything meaningful happening at the top, with governments and multinational corporations,” Reidelbach continues. “Whether or not we win, Transition is the only group offering a model where I can deal with fossil fuel depletion and climate change myself.”

Why Humanity Is More Vulnerable to the Power of the Ocean Than Ever Before

Brian Fagan, Bloomsbury Press — Mon, 10 Jun 2013 14:55:00 -0700

We're in for environmental refugee crises.

The following is an excerpt from Brian Sagan's new book, "The Attacking Ocean." (Bloomsbury Press, 2013)

Chapter 1: Minus One Hundred Twenty-Two Meters and Climbing

On October 28, 2012, Hurricane Sandy, the largest Atlantic hurricane on record, came ashore in New Jersey. Sandy’s assault and sea surge brought the ocean into neighborhoods and houses, inundated parking lots and tunnels, turned parks into lakes. When it was all over and the water receded, a huge swath of the Northeast American coast looked like a battered moonscape. Only Hurricane Katrina, which devastated New Orleans in 2005, was more costly. Katrina, with its gigantic sea surge, had been a wakeup call for people living on low- lying coasts, but the disaster soon receded from the public consciousness. Sandy struck in the heart of the densely populated Northeastern Corridor of the United States seven years later and impacted the lives of millions of people. The storm was an epochal demonstration of the power of an attacking ocean to destroy and kill in a world where tens of millions of people live on coastlines close to sea level. This time, people really sat up and took notice in the face of an extreme weather event of a type likely to be more commonplace in a warmer future. As this book goes to press, a serious debate about rising sea levels and the hazards they pose for humanity may have ﬁnally begun—but perhaps not.

Sandy developed out of a tropical depression south of Kingston, Jamaica, on October 22. Two days later, it passed over Jamaica, then over Cuba and Haiti, killing seventy-one people, before traversing the Bahamas. Come October 28, Sandy strengthened again, eventually makinglandfall about 8 kilometers southwest of Atlantic City, New Jersey, with winds of 150 kilometers an hour. By then, Sandy was not only an unusually large hurricane but also a hybrid storm. A strong Arctic air pattern to the north forced Sandy to take a sharp left into the heavy populated Northeast when normally it would have veered into the open Atlantic and dissipated there. The blend produced a super storm with a wind diameter of 1,850 kilometers, said to be the largest since 1888, when far fewer people lived along the coast and in New York. Unfortunately, the tempest also arrived at a full moon with its astronomical high tides. Sandy was only a Category 1 hurricane, but it triggered a major natural disaster partly because it descended on a densely populated seaboard where thousands of houses and other property lie within a few meters of sea level. Imagine the destruction a Category 5 storm would have wrought— something that could happen in the future.

The scale of destruction was mind-boggling. Sandy brought torrential downpours, heavy snowfall, and exceptionally high winds to an area of the eastern United States larger than Europe. Over one hundred people died in the affected states, forty of them in New York City. The storm cut off electricity for days for over 4.8 million customers in 15 states and the District of Columbia, 1,514,147 of them in New York alone. Most destructive of all, a powerful, record-breaking 4.26-meter sea surge swept into New York Harbor on the evening of October 29. The rising waters inundated streets, tunnels, and subways in Lower Manhattan, Staten Island, and elsewhere. Fires caused by electrical explosions and downed power wires destroyed homes and businesses, over one hundred residences in the Breezy Point area of Queens alone. Even the Ground Zero construction site was ﬂooded. Fortunately, the authorities had advance warning. In advance of the storm, all public transit systems were shut down, ferry ser vices were suspended, and airports closed until it was safe to ﬂy. All major bridges and tunnels into the city were closed. The New York Stock Exchange shut down for two days.

Initial recovery was slow, with shortages of gasoline causing long lines. Rapid transit systems slowly restored service, but the damage caused by the storm surge in lower Manhattan delayed reopening of critical links for days. The New Jersey Shore, an iconic vacation area in the Northeast, suffered worst of all. For almost 150 years, people from hot, crowded cities have ﬂocked to the Shore to lie on its beaches, families often going to the same place for generations. They eat ice cream and pizza, play in arcades once used by their grandparents, drink in bars, and go to church. The Shore could be a seedy place, fraught with racial tensions, and sometimes crime and violence, but there was always something for everybody, be they a wealthy resident of a mansion, a contestant in a Miss America pageant, a reality TV actor, a skinny-dipper, or a musician. Bruce Springsteen grew up along the Shore and his second album featured the song “4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy),” an ode to a girl of that name and the Shore. “Sandy, the aurora is rising behind us; the pier lights our carnival life forever,” he sang. The words have taken on new meaning since the hurricane came.

Fortunately, the residents were warned in advance of the storm. They were advised to evacuate their homes as early as October 26. Two days later, the order became mandatory. New Jersey governor Chris Christie also ordered the closure of Atlantic City’s casinos, a decision that proved wise when Sandy swept ashore with brutal force, pulverizing long-established businesses, boardwalks, and homes. Atlantic City started a trend when it built its ﬁ rst boardwalk in 1870 to stop visitors from tracking sand into hotels. Boardwalk amusements are big business today, many of them faced by boardwalks that are as much as a 0.8-kilometer from the waves. Now many of the Shore’s iconic boardwalks are history. The waves and storm surge destroyed a roller coaster in Seaside Heights; it lay half submerged in the breakers. Seaside Heights itself was evacuated because of gas leaks and other dangers. Piers and carousels vanished; bars and restaurants were reduced to rubble. Bridges to barrier islands buckled, leaving residents unable to return home. The Shore may be rebuilt, but it will never be the same. A long-lived tradition has been interrupted, perhaps never to return. For all the fervent vows that the Shore will rise again, no one knows what will come back in its place along a coastline where the ocean, not humanity, is master.

As the waters of destruction receded, they left $50 billion of damage behind them, and a sobering reminder of the hazards millions of people face along the densely populated eastern coast of the United States. Like Hurricanes Katrina in 2005 and Irene in 2011, Sandy showed us in no uncertain terms that a higher incidence of extreme weather events with their attendant sea surges threaten low-lying communities along much of the East Coast— from Rhode Island and Delaware to the Chesapeake and parts of Washington, DC, and far south along the Carolina coasts and into Florida, which escaped the full brunt of Sandy’s fury. There, high windsand waves washed sand onto coastal roads and there was some coastal ﬂooding, a warning of what would certainly occur should a major hurricane come ashore in Central or Southern Florida—and the question is not if such an event will occur, but when.

One hundred and twenty meters and climbing: that’s the amount of sea level rise since the end of the Ice Age some ﬁfteen thousand years ago. Slowly, inexorably, the ascent continues in a warming world. Today the ocean laps at millions of people’s doorsteps— crouched, ready to wreak catastrophic destruction with storm-generated sea surges and ﬂoods. We face a future that we are not prepared to handle, and it’s questionable just how much most of us think about it. This makes the lessons of Katrina, Irene, and Sandy, and other recent storms important to heed. Part of our understanding of the threat must come from an appreciation of the complex relationship between humanity and the rising ocean, which is why this book begins on a low land bridge between Siberia and Alaska ﬁfteen thousand years ago ...

***

Extreme weather events come in many forms— blanketing snowstorms, tornadoes, torrential rainfall, and long-enduring droughts, to mention only a few. However, the most dangerous are hurricanes and tropical cyclones, which generate not only powerful winds and sheets of rain, but also violent sea surges. The infamous Hurricane Katrina, which devastated New Orleans in 2005, alerted us forcibly to the dangers of exceptional storms along low coasts besieged by subsidence and rising sea levels. As we describe in chapter 13, much of the damage and loss of life came not from the hurricane-force winds and rain, but from the sea surge and high tides that followed on the storm. Raging waters swept ashore and carried away entire parishes and massive artiﬁcial levees that protected low-lying parts of New Orleans.

Hurricanes like Katrina generate sea surges by the wind blowing directly toward shore and pushing water up onto the land. This is what devastated the Mississippi delta in 2005 and Galveston, Texas, in September 1900, when a hurricane-generated surge ﬂooded the city streets to a depth of at least six meters, destroying thirty-ﬁve hundred buildings and killing over six thousand people. Since the Galveston disaster, improved early warning systems, seawalls, and stronger buildings have reduced casualties in better- developed parts of the world, but rising urban populations and the complex and expensive logistics of warning, evacuation, and recovery make it increasingly difﬁ cult to avoid truly catastrophic human and material destruction.

Tropical cyclones are a major hazard in many parts of the world, notably in the western Paciﬁ c and the Bay of Bengal. Low-lying Bangladesh is basically a huge river delta at the head of the bay, where tropical cyclones breed, cover large areas, and move northward into the funnel created by the coasts on either side of the ocean.

We are already reaping a whirlwind of vicious assaults by an ocean that once lay 122 meters below today’s threatened shorelines. Billions of people are at risk from an attacking sea. Our future will be challenging, even before one factors in the ever-present threat of earthquakes and tsunamis. As history shows us, our vulnerability to an encroaching and often aggressive ocean has increased exponentially, especially since the rapid population growth of the Industrial Revolution. While as recently as eight thousand years ago, only a few tens of thousands of people lived at risk from rising waters—and they could adapt readily by upping stakes and moving—today millions of us live in imminent danger from the attacking ocean and from the savage weather events that await in a warmer future.

Published with permission from Bloomsbury Press.

New Documentary Claims Nuclear Power Can Save the Planet -- Should We Buy in?

Mark Hertsgaard, Terry Tempest Williams, The Nation — Mon, 10 Jun 2013 14:38:00 -0700

A conversation about a new documentary "Pandora's Promise," its provocative claims—and the facts it leaves out.

Recently, acclaimed writer and activist Terry Tempest Williams alerted The Nation about a new documentary she had just seen that caused her to question her long-held opposition to nuclear power. Pandora’s Promise, which appears in theaters in June and will be broadcast by CNN in the fall, features five “converts” who argue that the dire threat of climate change requires humanity to embrace nuclear power as an alternative to fossil fuels. Mark Hertsgaard, The Nation’s environment correspondent, who has been covering the nuclear industry since investigating it for his book Nuclear Inc. (Pantheon, 1983), had a different reaction to the film. What follows is a dialogue between Williams and Hertsgaard about the film, the history of the nuclear industry and alternative solutions to the climate crisis.—The Editors

Terry Tempest Williams: “I belong to a Clan of One-Breasted Women. My mother, my grandmothers and six aunts have all had mastectomies. Seven are dead.” So begins the epilogue of my memoir, Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place, written in 1991. As Utahns, residents of the Atomic West, we are hibakusha, explosion-affected people bound by the wind. Half of my family has died from cancers that I believe were a result of radioactive fallout caused by aboveground nuclear explosions tested in the Nevada desert from 1945 to 1962. In declassified materials from the Atomic Energy Commission, Mormons and Indians living downwind of the blasts were considered “a low-use segment of the population.” In the eyes of our government, my people were expendable. Almost $800 million has been paid in compensation to “down-winders” as an acknowledgment and apology by the government for negligence against its citizens in the testing of nuclear weapons during the Cold War. My family’s story is just one in an anthology of thousands.

So when I say that Robert Stone’s film Pandora’s Promise challenged my thinking after thirty years of antinuclear activism and repeated arrests at the Nevada Test Site on behalf of “the Clan of One-Breasted Women,” it is not a small statement. This crack in my own thinking is heightened by the fact that I am now watching my extended community of plants, animals, rocks, rivers and human beings be ravaged by the oil and gas industry, be it fracking or the razing of vulnerable wildlands. And then there is the BP oil spill.

For me, this film’s strength was not that it changed my mind, which it did not, but that it expanded it. I am interested in having an open conversation about nuclear energy. Climate change is real. We know we must wean ourselves off fossil fuels. So what are the alternatives? Are renewable energy sources enough for the energy-poor around the world? My questions are many. Richard Jeffries, the nineteenth-century British naturalist, wrote: “Never, never rest contented with any circle of ideas, but always be certain that a wider one is still possible.”

Mark Hertsgaard: Questioning one’s assumptions is a good thing, but I have to point out that this documentary’s pro-nuclear argument is neither as original nor as brave as its protagonists seem to think. Watching Pandora’s Promise reminded me that the first time I heard the phrase “global warming” was thirty years ago… from a nuclear industry executive.

This was in the early 1980s, and the industry was in the doldrums. This executive told me that a number of factors, including something called global warming, would eventually cause citizens and public officials alike to recognize that the world faced a “nuclear imperative,” as he and other executives called it. Sometime around the turn of the century, he confided, global warming would help put nuclear power back on the agenda. This, of course, is the same message the industry has spent untold amounts of money promoting in recent years.

There is no hint in Pandora’s Promise that the film’s director or its protagonists are aware of this history—or, for that matter, that they’re in the pay of the industry. The fact is, however, that they and the film are playing roles in a drama written long ago by the very economic interests that would profit from a nuclear revival.

TTW: I didn’t know that history myself, Mark. But is it fair to say that you and I both agree with Pandora’s Promise that climate change is such an urgent threat that even a technology as problematic as nuclear power should not be automatically excluded from our options? And even if this argument fits a story line envisioned decades ago by the nuclear industry, don’t the voices in this film deserve a hearing?

One of the five converts in the film, Richard Rhodes, is someone for whom I have great respect as a writer. He is a deeply thoughtful man whose book The Making of the Atomic Bomb is a serious historical synthesis of the nuclear age. Among the other converts, I do find the work of Michael Shellenberger suspect on grounds of being intentionally incendiary and provocative. I am also troubled by the assertion in Mark Lynas’s book The God Species: Saving the Planet in the Age of Humans that we humans are now in control of all things wild and must turn to technology, including genetic engineering, to rescue ourselves. This kind of “pragmatic environmentalism” strikes me as a dangerously arrogant way of seeing our interdependent relationship with the earth.

Even so, I’m interested in the nature of change—how it occurs and why. If I am asking people to change their way of thinking, especially regarding climate change and the adoption of an ethic of place, then it seems only fair to ask that of myself. A reassessment of nuclear energy becomes part of that inquiry.

MH: That’s the conceit of the film, and it’s an angle that has animated more than a few recent media stories about a supposed split in the green movement over whether nuclear power is acceptable as a response to climate change. My own reporting on the movement suggests that nothing so grandiose is under way. A small number of individual environmentalists have advocated nuclear, as have some scientists who rank as climate heroes—notably James Hansen, formerly of NASA, and David King, the former chief scientific adviser to the British government. Other prominent backers include Microsoft co-founders Bill Gates and Paul Allen; in fact, Allen is one of the producers of Pandora’s Promise. Nevertheless, the overwhelming majority of green groups and leaders continue to oppose nuclear power.

The five converts featured in Pandora’s Promise speak for themselves as individuals; they don’t represent large environmental organizations—or small ones, for that matter. Gwyneth Cravens and Richard Rhodes don’t even appear to have track records as activists; Cravens is a fiction writer. Stewart Brand helped found the Whole Earth Catalog, but that was over forty years ago; since then, he’s spent much of his time as a consultant to corporations, including some in the energy sector. Shellenberger is a PR man who, as he says in the film, used to consult for environmental groups but no longer does.

The only bona fide activist is Lynas, who also happens to have written a fine book about climate change, Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet. Some activists are now attacking Lynas as a sellout, especially after his speech in January apologizing for his previous activism against genetically modified crops. But I know and respect Mark and think he is sincere, and in any case I don’t see the value in personalizing such disagreements.

To answer your question, Terry, it is absolutely valid to reconsider nuclear power—and other controversial technologies as well—in light of the fast-accelerating climate crisis. It is also true, as the film emphasizes, that coal is a dirty, deadly technology that needs to be retired as quickly as possible. The mercury and other local air pollutants released by burning coal kill at least 13,000 people every year in the United States alone. And, of course, burning coal is also the largest source globally of the greenhouse gases that are driving our planet toward potentially irreversible warming.

One of my objections to Pandora’s Promise, though, is how the film pretends all of this is news to environmentalists. The truth is that environmentalists hate coal and are fighting it tooth and nail. And quite successfully, I might add: a grassroots campaign led by local environmentalists and coordinated by the Sierra Club has helped end the building of new coal-fired power plants in the United States.

So, yes, I’m all in favor of keeping an open mind. But let’s get the facts straight.

TTW: The fracture line that I do believe is present and widening within the green movement is a philosophical one that cuts to the core of Pandora’s Promise. Given that our species numbers 7 billion and rising, there are those who believe the only practical way we can sustain an energy-rich future is to commit to more development, more technology—nuclear energy included—as we continue on the trajectory of progress to fuel more consumption. The energy-poor deserve what we have in places like the United States and Europe. There is no turning back. We have no historical evidence of stopping the arrow of progress. Developing nations deserve America’s privilege. This is a core belief that saturates the logic of this documentary and its converts.

The other side of the movement is less human-centered: it asks for restraint, seeing ourselves as a species among a cacophony of other species, interdependent and interrelated, where what is called for is not new technology but a new planetary consciousness. This includes the choice to embrace an ethic of conservation that honors biodiversity, wild lands and wild lives. That includes plants and animals—all living species, not just our own. Allow me to quote Robinson Jeffers: “Integrity is wholeness, the greatest beauty…the divine beauty of the universe. Love that, not man/ apart from that, or else you will share man’s pitiful confusions, or drown in despair when his days darken.” The question becomes not how can we further promote a lifestyle of living beyond our energy means, but how can we live more lightly on the planet.

In truly understanding what is driving this film, it’s crucial to understand the philosophical underpinnings behind it. But you ask to get the facts right, Mark, and I agree. My primary critique of Pandora’s Promise is its reliance solely on facts that serve the assertions of the five converts. People opposed to nuclear energy are uniformly portrayed as naïve, ill-informed, irrational freaks. Regardless of how you view Dr. Helen Caldicott (she remains a hero of mine for her early alert call), she is hugely maligned in this film, appearing as an antinuclear wingnut shrieking to her Grateful Dead choir. It is a gross oversimplification and displays prejudice. Not one well-spoken opponent of nuclear energy appears on the screen—not one.

And when the film’s converts speak to their preferred facts that there have been no deaths from radioactive fallout since the Fukushima meltdowns in 2011, and that the Chernobyl nuclear accident in 1986 caused only fifty-six deaths, my first complaint is the one lodged within my own cells and the cells of my family members, now buried: it’s too damn early to tell. Cancer from radiation exposure usually takes time to present itself; it is not immediate. My second complaint is that there are plenty of scientific studies—most recently, a report published by the National Cancer Institute in 2012—all refuting the notion that radioactivity is all but harmless, though one wouldn’t know this from watching the film.

MH: You can say that again. Even the UN International Atomic Energy Agency, an organization committed to promoting nuclear power, concluded in a 2005 study that the radioactivity released at Chernobyl would cause 4,000 cancer deaths. A study by the UN Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation concluded in 2008 that Chernobyl had caused 6,000 thyroid cancers among children, and “many more” such cancers are projected in the years ahead. But the UNSCEAR study didn’t take into account the long-term impacts of radioactivity, as the European Environment Agency pointed out earlier this year. Applying the standard risk estimates established by the International Commission on Radiological Protection, the EEA said that Chernobyl will cause between 17,000 and 68,000 cancer deaths over the fifty years following the 1986 accident, as well as additional cardiovascular and immunological diseases.

Instead of confronting this multidimensional mosaic of scientific findings, Pandora’s Promise portrays all nuclear critics as clones of Helen Caldicott, whom the film shows claiming Chernobyl caused “a million” deaths. Caldicott’s figure is derived from an analysis published in 2007 by former Soviet environmental adviser Alexey Yablokov and two colleagues, which had severe methodological shortcomings. But that doesn’t mean Chernobyl hasn’t killed many thousands of people to date and won’t kill many more in years to come.

TTW: Pandora’s Promise continues to tell us that not only are antinuclear activists confused, but we, the public, have conflated nuclear power with nuclear weapons, and this confusion is responsible for nuclear power’s image problems. As a writer, I understand the power of imagery and how it enters our imagination: we see the mushroom cloud, and we equate its destructive power with the dangers inside a nuclear power plant. But I don’t believe this equation is a myth. The power of plutonium both to create and to destroy is a hard-edged truth. No one knew this better than the scientists themselves, from Einstein to Oppenheimer. So another question arises: Can we separate nuclear power from its military applications? Plutonium can be a force for good and a force for evil, just as humans are.

MH: Once more, this film echoes a lament I heard from corporate executives while writing Nuclear Inc. One exec, complaining about the public’s “irrational” fears, said he’d come up with the perfect antidote: utility companies should paint cooling towers bright colors and add daisies, too. The bosses, being mainly no-nonsense engineers, didn’t see the genius of his plan, he grumbled.

But a paint job isn’t enough to sever the link between the military and civilian applications of nuclear energy. It’s an inalterable physical fact: nuclear fission produces plutonium, which can be used to make nuclear weapons. The weapons risk is especially high in the type of reactor that Pandora’s Promise champions, a breeder reactor. This is because breeders don’t just produce plutonium; they also use it as fuel. A “reprocessing” plant then recycles the burned fuel, producing yet more plutonium that the breeder can burn anew. Advocates therefore praise breeders for providing a virtually inexhaustible source of fuel—enough to power not just the United States but the world for centuries to come, allowing humanity to leave fossil fuels behind. As Brand says about plutonium in the film, eyes twinkling, “That looks very much like a renewable resource.”

The problem, again, is that this same miracle fuel is the key ingredient in nuclear weapons. In fact, it was by exploiting the dual nature of nuclear fission that India acquired nuclear weapons in 1974—much as Iran is believed to be trying to do in 2013. Publicly, India’s leaders pledged to use reprocessing only for power production. In reality, they used the first batch of plutonium they reprocessed to fuel what they called a “peaceful nuclear explosion.” This earth-shaking event caused rival Pakistan to beg, borrow and steal until it detonated its own nuclear weapons in 1998. Other nations have followed suit, creating a world where many different hands now hover over many different nuclear triggers.

None of this inconvenient history is mentioned in Pandora’s Promise. Instead, the hot-button words “breeder reactor” are only uttered once, in passing, after which the film refers only to the “integral fast reactor,” though the IFR is in fact a type of breeder reactor. It’s a remarkably one-sided presentation.

TTW: I am a strong advocate for documentary films. I also believe artists have a right to their own creative vision. And I admire Robert Stone’s courage to tell a different story. What becomes problematic is that facts matter when there is so much at stake, from plutonium getting into the hands of terrorists to the issue of nuclear waste and public health, not to mention the astronomical costs of building nuclear power plants. Even so, I remain open to learning about new strategies for nuclear energy; this is the conversation I am seeking.

At my invitation, Robert Stone screened Pandora’s Promise at Dartmouth College this spring. It was a spirited discussion, to say the least. Many in the audience appreciated bringing nuclear energy back into the conversation on climate change and supported nuclear power and the film enthusiastically. There were also antinuclear activists from Vermont who were deeply upset by the film, having fought the Yankee nuclear power plant for years. And there were others, myself included, who didn’t understand the nuances of the integral fast reactors, which the film posits as the solution to climate change. So I now turn to you, my friend, to provide clarity.

MH: You know you’re watching a wonky film when it spends ages extolling the virtues of something called an integral fast reactor, complete with models and graphs. As it happens, the IFR was the Bush/Cheney administration’s favorite reactor design. In Pandora’s Promise, it is Charles Till, who headed an aborted government program to develop the IFR in the 1980s and ’90s, who makes the case.

The film accepts uncritically Till’s claim that the IFR is inherently safe. IFRs are, however, cooled by sodium, which reacts violently upon contact with air or water; nearly all of the world’s sodium-cooled reactors have suffered fires, like the one that closed the Monju nuclear plant in Japan in 1995. (“Monju” is another word absent from this film.) The delicacy of working with sodium has made repairs and maintenance very time-consuming, causing long power outages. In France, whose enthusiastic embrace of all things nuclear Pandora’s Promise urges the United States and the world to emulate, the defunct SuperPhoenix breeder reactor generated less than 7 percent of its electricity capacity during its years of operation. Today, after global expenditures of $100 billion, there is not a single commercially operating breeder reactor on earth—which is but one example of how appallingly expensive nuclear power has turned out to be (more on this shortcoming below).

But the reprocessing plants built to supply plutonium—for all the breeders once envisioned and for nuclear weapons manufacturing—have kept operating. As a result, there are now an estimated 250 tons of plutonium at these plants, enough to make approximately 30,000 nuclear weapons. Is it really wise to go further down this road, even in the name of halting climate change? The government has not thought so. Under Republican and Democratic administrations alike and with bipartisan congressional support, Washington halted the development of breeder rectors in the 1970s and canceled Till’s beloved IFR program in 1994. Yet all the film has to say about proliferation risks is this statement by Rhodes: “There are thirty-seven countries around the world that could produce nuclear weapons, according to the CIA. But none have produced them.” That is not correct, as India’s example, among others, demonstrates. In any case, given how crucial breeders are to this film’s argument that only nuclear energy can prevent climate catastrophe, it is shocking how little it says about the most obvious objection this stance invites: that spreading reprocessing technology around the world would significantly increase the risk of nuclear war. Is the filmmaker trying to dodge this troublesome issue? Or is he simply out of his intellectual depth?

TTW: When Pandora’s Promise was screened at Dartmouth, some of the strongest objections voiced by audience members concerned the film’s dismissal of all noncarbon energy sources except nuclear. Peter Bradford, a former member of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, took issue with the film’s claim that renewable energy sources are available only intermittently—because the sun doesn’t always shine or the wind always blow—and therefore can’t be relied on. That is not true, especially of geothermal energy, Bradford noted. “Saying that nuclear energy can solve climate change is like saying caviar can solve world hunger,” he said.

Gus Speth, co-founder of the Natural Resources Defense Council, found fault with the film’s assumption that humanity is moving inevitably toward a future that will require producing more energy. “Many of us who have been carefully studying this issue just don’t believe that,” he told Stone, adding that without a more informed discussion of the potential of energy efficiency, Pandora’s Promise loses credibility. Stone’s response was to invoke the inhabitants of developing countries who, he said, “want and deserve” the same material goods as we have in America, and to argue that conservation measures just aren’t enough, nor can renewables carry the energy load.

For me, these questions can be translated to one overall question: What energy sources can we employ that do the least harm to life on earth and at the same time can meet the expanding needs of the human family?

MH: If our options really were as simple as Pandora’s Promise maintains—either go nuclear or incinerate the planet with more coal—it’d be a tough call. But that’s not the case. To make it seem so, the film trashes all nonnuclear alternatives. It is especially dismissive of wind and solar in what I found to be, frankly, an embarrassingly dated critique, though it fits the meta-narrative of Shellenberger’s Breakthrough Institute, some of whose funders helped to finance this film.

Five or six years ago, one could make a plausible argument that solar and wind power were unreliable, unaffordable niche products. But in 2013, when wind power is by far the fastest-growing source of electricity here? (It’s poised to supply 40 percent of the power in Iowa, for example.) And when solar is growing nearly as fast, largely because customers in twenty-two states and the District of Columbia can now get rooftop panels installed free and enjoy guaranteed lower monthly electric bills thereafter?

How about overseas? Germany, the world’s fourth-largest economy, is well on the way to leaving nuclear and fossil fuels behind as it embraces a panoply of noncarbon energy sources. In China, solar-powered water heaters are now standard features on new housing, while solar lamps are spreading much-needed light and prosperity in countless villages in Asia and Africa. How then are solar and wind still “marginal” energy sources, as this documentary asserts?

If nonnuclear sources of renewable energy are really as chimerical as Pandora’s Promise would have us believe, why is the military accelerating its pursuit of them? How did the National Renewable Energy Laboratory come up with its conclusion that the United States could employ them, in conjunction with a smart grid, to reduce its consumption of carbon-based fuels by 80 percent by 2050? Are these establishment institutions and many others like them really less informed and savvy than the five converts featured in this film?

TTW: Michael Totten, whom I regard as one of the world’s leading thinkers about green technologies and ecological sustainability, has set forth these criteria when exploring energy alternatives:

Is it economically affordable, including for the poor?

Is it safe throughout its entire life cycle?

Is it clean throughout its entire lifespan?

Is the risk low and manageable?

Is it resilient and flexible to volatility, surprises, miscalculations and human error?

Is it ecologically sustainable, with no adverse impacts on biodiversity?

Is it environmentally benign in maintaining air, water and soil quality?

If it fails, does it fail gracefully, not catastrophically?

Does it rebound easily and swiftly from failures?

Is it an uninteresting target for malicious disruption, off the radar of terrorists and military planners?

And I think about this: it is possible we haven’t come close to understanding the true nature of forms of energy that have little to do with fossil fuels or the splitting of atoms. We cannot talk about the future without talking about the imagination and what it might bring forth.

MH: Ironically, your point applies particularly well to a source of renewable energy that is generally seen as anything but imaginative: energy efficiency. It takes imagination to envision all the cost-effective ways to improve a given building or business’s energy efficiency, but the payoff is bountiful. As the work of Amory Lovins and his colleagues at the Rocky Mountain Institute has demonstrated in great detail, improving energy efficiency is by far the quickest, safest and most lucrative route to reducing consumption of fossil fuels. Indeed, it is the potential of energy efficiency that leads Lovins to argue that going nuclear would actually make global warming worse, not better.

How can that be so, you might ask, given that nuclear produces carbon-free electricity? The answer is rooted not in arguments about nuclear power’s safety or lack thereof, but in its severe economic shortcomings. Nuclear power is fantastically expensive—so expensive that private investors long ago stopped financing large nuclear plants. So for society to allocate scarce capital to nuclear power amounts to pursuing the slowest, costliest route to displacing fossil fuels, while diverting capital from the fastest, cheapest route. Energy efficiency is far more cost-effective at reducing overall greenhouse gas emissions: adding better insulation to buildings and upgrading motors and appliances begins cutting fossil fuel use all but immediately. Data collected by Lovins and his colleagues demonstrate that each dollar invested in improving energy efficiency produces seven times more reduction in greenhouse gas emissions than a dollar invested in nuclear. Seven timesmore. Turning our backs on that option in favor of nuclear therefore makes global warming worse by slowing our response to the real problem.

Nevertheless, energy efficiency is yet another common-sense solution to climate change that this film disparages without bothering to offer evidence. Shellenberger, who “felt angry” after having bought the “seductive” myth of energy efficiency while reading Lovins in college, declares: “People think we’ll reduce our energy consumption [after improving energy efficiency], but in fact we’ll just find more uses for it.” Apparently, that single sentence is meant to settle the matter. Except it doesn’t. Those wacky tree-huggers at McKinsey & Company, one of the world’s foremost management consulting firms, have demonstrated that improved efficiency could cut US energy consumption by 23 percent by 2020, while saving $680 billion and abating 1.1 gigatons of greenhouse gas emissions annually.

Now, it’s not an open-and-shut case for energy efficiency. As the Breakthrough Institute is forever arguing, the “rebound effect”—whereby better efficiency can lead to extra use of the underlying technology, as when a buyer of a more fuel-efficient car then uses it more often—does exist. But it is, as the institute has acknowledged, “relatively small”—something Pandora’s Promise fails to mention. Of course, a documentary film is not a PhD thesis, but this is the posture not of a seeker of truth, but a propagandist who cherry-picks “facts” to fit his agenda.

TTW: For me, Pandora’s Promise is still a compelling film, even if its “facts” are cherry-picked; that cherry-picking is one of the reasons I am glad you and I are having this public conversation: to hold the film accountable. As you can see, there is much about this film that I disagree with. I do not feel antinuclear activists have any kinship whatsoever with climate deniers, as the film repeatedly asserts. I resent this simplistic comparison. My eyes have been opened by death, not fear, and I remain a respecter of science and a seeker of facts.

But, Mark, this film made me think; it created a disturbance in my mind and prompted me to question my most tightly held assumption—that nuclear energy is not a viable solution. I do not take this lightly. The shadow side of nuclear power killed my family. I have been jailed for my convictions, and they contain my own conversion story of how I have tried to transform my anger into sacred rage. But twenty-five years later, as I watch my beloved American West suffer from the ravages of oil and gas extraction—including the perils of fracking and developing tar sands in arid country—I believe something has to shift if we are to remain human beings who care about sustaining life on this planet. We are not just living on a planet in crisis; we as a species are in crisis.

The big question for me is if we will come to our senses soon enough to help. And on that, the odds are uncertain. I remain uncertain about what the right course of action is regarding energy. We have a nuclear power plant proposed on the banks of the Green River in Utah. Am I in favor of it being built? No. But am I in favor of investigating the next generation of smaller nuclear reactors that are more localized and decentralized? Yes, I am. Committing ourselves to thousands of years of nuclear waste still remains the largest and prohibiting factor for me. Can we really trust ourselves as nuclear guardians through the millennia? We have a less than stellar track record.

Humans are now the most influential geomorphic agent on the planet’s surface. We are living in the Anthropocene Epoch. Some see this development as reason for restraint, for taking into consideration the health of diverse ecosystems, human and wild. Others, like the converts in this film, assert the inevitability of human expansion, with technology the only cure for our collective hunger for more and more energy. For my part, I submit that the solutions to climate change are as much about will and evolutionary consciousness as they are about technological choices. It is also about humility. Humans are not “the God species.” We are simply one more breathing, struggling species, one that has been gifted with a large imagination that has a propensity to shape the environment around us. Our task is not to unleash a box of demons upon the world. It is to nurture a space for serious dialogue about our energy choices, while employing our imagination and sustaining what we should love and cherish most: life.

MH: This critique gets at what may be the most basic shortcoming of the film: its blindness to the political-economic context of the nuclear technology it admires so much. Personally, I have no ideological beef with nuclear power. As the father of an 8-year-old daughter who, like billions of other young people around the world, is fated to spend the rest of her life facing higher temperatures than our civilization has ever confronted, I would be grateful if a miracle technology could deliver us from the gathering storm. But history teaches that every technology comes wrapped in a set of social, economic and political constraints. If we ignore those constraints, we will likely be surprised—and not in a good way—by what unfolds. Pandora’s Promise shows no hint of recognizing such nuances. That is hardly a surprise in a documentary backed by a Microsoft billionaire, but it makes the film less a contribution to public dialogue than a self-regarding provocation.

Grand Canyon Threatened by Uranium Mining

Sierra Club — Fri, 07 Jun 2013 13:59:00 -0700

Here's what is at stake and what you can do to protect the Grand Canyon.

Editor's Note: View a slideshow from Post Carbon Institute with photos by Ecoflight to see the threatened land and take action.

The U.S. Forest Service has decided to allow Energy Fuels Resources, Inc. to begin operating a uranium mine near Grand Canyon National Park. The Canyon Mine, located on the Kaibab National Forest six miles south of the park, threatens cultural values, wildlife and endangered species, and increases the risk of soil pollution and pollution and depletion of groundwater feeding springs and wells in and near Grand Canyon.

The mine was originally approved in 1986 and was the subject of protests and lawsuits by the Havasupai tribe and others objecting to potential uranium mining impacts on regional groundwater, springs, creeks, ecosystems and cultural values associated with Red Butte, a Traditional Cultural Property.

Mines that were closed nearly three decades ago continue to pollute streams in the area. The Orphan Mine at the South Rim of Grand Canyon closed in 1969 but still contaminates Horn Creek with radioactive runoff. Recently, the National Park Service began a clean-up effort for that mine that will cost taxpayers millions.

The Canyon Mine falls within the one-million-acre “mineral withdrawal” approved by the Obama administration in January 2012 to protect Grand Canyon’s watershed from new uranium mining impacts. The withdrawal prohibits new mining claims and mine development on old claims lacking “valid existing rights” to mine. In April 2012, the Forest Service determined that there were “valid existing rights” for the Canyon mine, and in June it issued a report trying to explain its decision to allow the mine to open without updating the 27-year-old environmental review. The Havasupai tribe and three conservation groups are challenging this.

Please speak up against the mine and support protectionof Grand Canyon and its watershed.

Click the slideshow below to see what's at stake and take action to protect the Grand Canyon.

Click the thumbnails to see the slideshow and take action (photos by Ecoflight)

Victory for Grassroots Activism and Public Safety: San Onofre Nuclear Plant Closure Announced

Harvey Wasserman, AlterNet — Fri, 07 Jun 2013 11:20:00 -0700

This victory at San Onofre is a falling domino. Had the public not fought back, those reactors would have been “fixed” at public expense.

From his California beach house at San Clemente, Richard Nixon once watched three reactors rise at nearby San Onofre. As of June 7, 2013, all three are permanently shut.

It’s a monumental victory for grassroots activism and it marks an epic transition in how we get our energy.

In the thick of the 1970s Arab oil embargo, Nixon said there’d be 1000 such reactors in the US by the year 2000. As of today, there are 100. Four have shut here this year. Citizen activism has put the “nuclear renaissance” into full retreat.

Just two of 54 reactors now operate in Japan, where Fukushima has joined Chernobyl and Three Mile Island in permanently scarring us all.

Germany is shutting its entire fleet and switching to renewables. France, once the poster child for the global reactor industry, is following suit. South Korea has just shut three due to fraudulent safety procedures. Massive demonstrations rage against reactors being built in India. Only the Koreans, Chinese and Russians remain at all serious about pushing ahead with this tragic technology.

Cheap gas has undercut the short-term market for expensive electricity generated by obsolete coal and nuke burners. But the vision of Solartopia---a totally green-powered Earth---is now our tangible long-term reality.

With falling prices and soaring efficiency, every moving electron our species consumes will be generated by a solar panel, wind turbine, bio-fueled or geothermal generator, wave machine and their green siblings.

As of early this year, Southern California Edison's path to a re-start at San Onofre seemed as clear as any to be expected by a traditional atomic tyrannosaur.But with help from Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and Senator-to-be Ed Markey (D-MA), a powerful citizen uprising stopped it dead.

So did the terrifying incompetence and greed that has defined the nuclear industry from the days of Nixon and before.

San Onofre Unit One shut in the 1990s due largely to steam generator problems. In the early 2000s, Units 2 & 3 needed new steam generators of their own. In the usual grasp for more profits, Edison chose untested, unlicensed new designs. But they failed. And the whole world was watching. In the wake of Fukushima, two more leaky tsunami-zone reactors surrounded by earthquake faults were massively unwelcome.

So a well-organized non-violent core of local, state and national activists and organizations rose up to stop the madness.

At Vermont Yankee, Indian Point, Seabrook, Davis-Besse and dozens of other reactors around the US and world, parallel opposition is escalating.

Make no mistake---this double victory at San Onofre is a falling domino. Had the public not fought back, those reactors would have been “fixed” at public expense.

Today, they are dead.

Worldwide, there are some 400 to go. Each of them---including the 100 remaining in the US---could do apocalyptic damage. We still have our work cut out for us.

But a huge double-step has been taken up the road to Solartopia. There will be no Fukushimas at San Onofre. A green-powered Earth is that much closer. And we have yet another proof that citizen action makes all the difference in our world.

So seize the day and celebrate!

Pro-Fracking Greens Called Out in Ecologist Sandra Steingraber's New Manifesto

Jeff Biggers, YES! Magazine — Fri, 07 Jun 2013 08:05:00 -0700

In a statement, ecologist Sandra Steingraber denounced Illinois’ new fracking regulations and described the need for a movement dedicated to abolishing fracking nationwide.

A new salvo has been fired in the national battle against fracking.

Within hours of the Illinois General Assembly's vote on its controversial bill on hydraulic fracking last Friday night, the AP's headline rippled across nationwide newspapers: "Illinois lawmakers approve nation's toughest fracking regulations."

With New York readying to rescind or keep in place that state's temporary moratorium, and high stakes battles taking place across the nation about whether to regulate fracking or place moratoriums on it, Steingraber and a network of citizen groups have viewed Illinois as the staging ground for a fracking rush that will have an extraordinary ripple effect. Not so fast, says Dr. Sandra Steingraber, the renowned scientist whom Rolling Stone has called the " toxic avenger." She returned to her native Illinois last week to join a growing citizens uprising against gas drilling and sand mining operations she defines as "an accident-prone, inherently dangerous industrial process with risks that include catastrophic and irremediable damage to our health and environment."

Once hailed by the Sierra Club as the "new Rachel Carson," Steingraber denounced Illinois’ bill as "the result of closed-door negotiations between industry representatives and compromise-oriented environmental organizations." She testified in front of a last minute committee hearing of the Illinois House of Representatives, protested with sit-in activists, met with bill negotiators, and was even tossed out of the Illinois General Assembly for speaking out (see video at the bottom of this article).

With Gov. Pat Quinn's signature imminent, Business Insider gushed that Illinois “could become the epicenter of America's next oil boom."

Not under their watch, says Steingraber and the Illinois anti-fracking shock troops.

Issuing a "Fracking Manifesto," she has thrown down the gauntlet on Illinois' regulatory fallout as a cautionary tale for citizens groups, environmental organizations and frackers across the nation.

"We call for a mobilization that brings fracking realities to the rest of the nation," the manifesto declares. "If our elected officials refuse to visit the fracking fields, then we will bring the fracking fields to them—in the form of science, stories, photographs, film, lectures, hearings, and journalism. If elected officials refuse to defend our land, water, air, and health against those who would despoil them for their own profit, then we will do it ourselves, using peaceful, non-violent methods."

The full document is below.

A Fracking Manifesto

from Sandra Steingraber and the people of Illinois to the nation

We know that high-volume horizontal hydraulic fracking, or HVHF, is an accident-prone, inherently dangerous industrial process with risks that include catastrophic and irremediable damage to our health and environment.

We know that HVHF and its attendant technologies:

contribute to groundwater contamination, including 219 cases in Pennsylvania alone;
turn massive amounts of fresh, drinkable water into massive amounts of briny, poisonous flowback fluid for which there is no failsafe disposal solution;
vent hazardous air pollutants that are associated with cancer, asthma, heart attack, stroke, and preterm birth;
release radioactive substances—including radon, which is the number two cause of lung cancer—and benzene, which is a proven cause of leukemia—from deep geological strata;
fragment forests in ways that decimate birds and wildlife, sabotage natural flood control systems, and pour sediment into rivers and streams;
industrialize communities in ways that vastly increase truck traffic, noise pollution, light pollution, stress, crime, and the need for emergency services;
offer jobs that are dangerous, toxic, and temporary, with a fatality rate seven times that of other industries; and
leak prodigious amounts of methane, a potent heat-trapping gas.

We know these problems cannot be prevented by any set of rules or government office, let alone state agencies like those in Illinois, which have been cut to the bone by budget cuts and cannot be counted on for regulatory enforcement.

We have heard the warnings of our brothers and sisters living in the gas fields of Pennsylvania and Ohio, whose children, pets, and livestock are sick, whose property values are ruined, whose water is undrinkable.

We have heard the pleas of our neighbors in Wisconsin, Iowa, and Minnesota, where strip-mining for “ frac sand” has devastated communities, destroyed landscapes, and filled the air with carcinogenic silica dust. We are aware that our own beloved Starved Rock State Park is already threatened by industrial mining of silica sand used for fracking operations and that the pressure to strip-mine Illinois for sand will only increase with every well that is drilled and fracked.

We assert that fracking is a moral crisis. In a time of climate emergency, it is wrong to further deepen our dependency on fossil fuels. In a state such as Illinois, where chronic drought and water shortages are already forecast for our children’s future, it is wrong to destroy fresh water resources in order to bring new sources of climate-killing gas and oil out of the ground.

We reject the legitimacy of Illinois’ fracking regulatory bill, which was the result of closed-door negotiations between industry representatives and compromise-oriented environmental organizations. Responsible only to their funders and their members, these environmental groups do not represent us nor are they empowered to negotiate on our behalf. We consider the fracking regulatory bill to be a subversion of both science and democracy. Throughout its creation, no comprehensive health study or environmental impact study was ever commissioned. No public hearings or public comment periods ever took place. And yet it is the public that is being compelled to live with the risks sanctioned by this bill. It is an unjust law.

Knowing that our own government has abdicated its responsibility to protect the safety and well-being of the citizenry, knowing that no one is coming to save us, we declare our intent to save ourselves from the ravages of shale gas and oil extraction via HVHF. We declare our intent to join together in a fracking abolitionist movement.

As such, no longer shall national environmental organizations based far from impacted realities make decisions that will have life-changing impacts on the people living in impacted zones. We will call out organizations that betray core values and integrity. We will openly inform their membership and their funders and reveal the truth of where they stand and at whose expense.

We call for a mobilization that brings fracking realities to the rest of the nation. If our elected officials refuse to visit the fracking fields, then we will bring the fracking fields to them—in the form of science, stories, photographs, film, lectures, hearings, and journalism. If elected officials refuse to defend our land, water, air, and health against those who would despoil them for their own profit, then we will do it ourselves, using peaceful, nonviolent methods.

We hereby commit ourselves to building a powerful movement that will protect Illinois’ children—and safeguard the living ecosystem on which their lives depend—for generations to come. In short, we declare our intent to take the future into our hands. And that future is unfractured.

Sign on and join our movement.

Dr. Sandra Steingraber

Springfield, Illinois

Jeff Biggers wrote this article and shot these videos for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas and practical actions. Winner of the David R. Brower Award for Environmental Reporting, Jeff is the author of Reckoning at Eagle Creek: The Secret Legacy of Coal in the Heartland, among other books. His website is www.jeffbiggers.com.

AlterNet.org: Environment

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