It’s not the first time Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian has been scrutinized for its mature themes. This time it’s New York parents saying their sixth graders aren’t ready for the content in the book and have asked that it no longer be required summer reading.
“It’s about… masturbation—which is not appropriate for my child to learn at 11,” Kelly-Ann McMullan-Preiss, 39, of Belle Harbor, who refused to let her son read the book, told the New York Daily News. “It was like ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ for kids.”
At least eight parents planned to boycott the book, Parent Teacher Association co-president Irene Dougherty told the Daily News.
But before that was necessary, Public School/Middle School 114 in Rockaway Park, Queens announced on July 31 that the book would no longer be required summer reading. Prior to that announcement, incoming sixth graders had been expected to write an essay on the book, reported the Daily News.
McMullan-Preiss told the newspaper she didn’t want a book deciding when she would have the awkward conversation about masturbation with her son.
“And if God hadn’t wanted us to masturbate, then God wouldn’t have given us thumbs. So I thank God for my thumbs,” a line in the book says.
The book has come under scutiny before. The autobiographical story of a 14-year-old Native teen who explores questions of community, identity and tribe as he assimilates into a white, off-rez school has repeatedly been on the American Library Association’s list of most-challenged books. Though in 2012, it slipped from number two to number five on the list. It was cited for “offensive language, racism, religious viewpoint,” and for being “sexually explicit, unsuited to age group.”
The book has also been rewarded heavily, winning the 2007 National Book Foundation Award for Young People’s Literature. The book also appears repeatedly on the Best of BookUp Selections for 2013—these are chosen by students at middle schools.
In 2011, Alexie (Spokane/Coeur d’Alene) wrote a piece for the Wall Street Journal in defense of not only his book, but others with mature themes, titled “Why the Best Kids Books Are Written in Blood.”
“I write books for teenagers because I vividly remember what it felt like to be a teen facing everyday and epic dangers,” he wrote. “I don’t write to protect them. It’s far too late for that. I write to give them weapons—in the form of words and ideas—that will help them fight their monsters. I write in blood because I remember what it felt like to bleed.”
He defending his book back in 2008 as well when it was pulled from an Oregon classroom.
“Everything in the book is what every kid in that school is dealing with on a daily basis, whether it’s masturbation or racism or sexism or the complications of being human,” Alexie told The Bulletin, an Oregon newspaper. “To pretend that kids aren’t dealing with this on an hour-by-hour basis is a form of denial.”
While Teri Lesesne, who teaches young adult literature at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas, feels everyone should read the book at some point, “I’m not sure I’d give it to sixth-graders,” she told the Daily News. “I’m not sure sixth-graders are young adults.”
Anchorage has set a record for the most consecutive days over 70 degrees during this unusually warm summer, while Fairbanks is closing in on its own seasonal heat record.
The National Weather Service said Alaska’s largest city topped out at 70 degrees at 4 p.m. Tuesday, making it the 14th straight day the thermometer read 70 or higher. That breaks a record of 13 straight days set in 2004.
In Fairbanks, temperatures Monday reached 80 or higher for the 29th day this summer.
While most of the world is getting warmer, the 49th state appeared recently to be getting colder – the temporary effect of a long-term oceanic weather pattern known as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation. Now the unusually toasty summer is raising questions about whether climate change is heating up the state, though some are arguing the heat wave could just be an anomaly.
What isn’t being questioned is the link between the hot weather and a die-off of 1,100 king salmon. The fish were returning to a hatchery south of Petersburg to spawn when they succumbed to hot water and low oxygen levels, perhaps worsened by low tides. From a weekend report by the AP:
Alaska Department of Fish and Game sportfish biologist Doug Fleming said he found the dead fish July 18 after last week’s warm weather, when temperatures were in the 80s.
He began monitoring water levels earlier in the week when it appeared temperatures were reaching dangerous levels.
“And so, getting through till Wednesday which appeared to be the hottest day, then on Thursday I was conducting an aerial survey just to get a grip on how many fish may have been killed by the warm water, not expecting to see a large die-off but some, and I was shocked to see the numbers of fish that we lost,” he said.
Seafair Weekend hydroplane races and air show, Aug. 2-4, Seattle
Madeline McKenzie, The Seattle Times
Colorful hydroplanes racing on Lake Washington and festival activities onshore star at the Seafair Weekend at Genesee Park Friday, Saturday and Sunday. The big event, a festive Seattle Seafair tradition since 1951, draws thousands of spectators on the shore and in watercraft for the hydro races, air show and summer fun.
The Patriots Jet Team stars in the daily Air Show, since the Navy’s popular Blue Angels couldn’t make it this year. Vintage and specialty planes perform in the air throughout all three days, and vintage hydroplanes are on display in the pits all weekend and in the water at 12:15 and 2:30 p.m. Friday, 10:20 a.m. Saturday and 10:45 a.m. and 1:15 p.m. Sunday.
Onshore events include military-flight simulations, entertainment, Kids Zone inflatable rides, souvenir vendors, interactive exhibits and a variety of food from 20 vendors. Learn all about hydroplane racing at the Hydro 101 tent, see the Budweiser Clydesdales and try the zip line and the new waterslide in Genesee Park.
Beer gardens are at the South Turn and North Turn areas with views of the races, and at Genesee Park adjacent to the music stage. It’s fine to bring your own food and beverages, but no outside alcohol is allowed.
Shoes are required in certain areas, including closed-toe shoes for access to Stan Sayres Pits for guided tours and up-close views of the hydros, available daily with purchase of a Pit Pass ($10/person). Grandstands are the only area providing reserved seating at premium cost. For everyone else, folding chairs or a blanket to sit on come in handy, though many spectators simply sit on the grass or stand near the lake during the races.
Parking is extremely limited in the area; advance parking is available online for $33 a day, if it’s not sold out. There’s a bike corral outside the main gate for bicycle parking. A free shuttle bus from the Columbia City Link Light Rail station offers 5-minute rides to the Seafair main gate 7 a.m.-6 p.m. Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Seafair’s website has a $10 coupon for all-day parking at SeaTac Airport Garage and information about parking near other Light Rail stations.
RIO DE JANEIRO — Pope Francis took on the defense of the Amazon and the environment near the end of his weeklong trip to Brazil, as he donned a colorful Indian headdress Saturday and urged that the rainforest be treated as a garden.
The pontiff met with a few thousand of Brazil’s political, business and cultural elite in Rio de Janeiro’s Municipal Theater, where he also shook hands with Indians who said they were from a tribe that has been battling ranchers and farmers trying to invade their land in northeastern Bahia state.
In a separate speech to bishops, the pope called for “respect and protection of the entire creation which God has entrusted to man, not so that it be indiscriminately exploited but rather made into a garden.”
He also urged attention to a 2007 document by Latin American and Caribbean bishops that he was in charge of drafting, which underscored dangers facing the Amazon environment and the native people living there. The document also called for new evangelization efforts to halt a steep decline in Catholics leaving for other faiths or secularism.
“The traditional communities have been practically excluded from decisions on the wealth of biodiversity and nature. Nature has been, and continues to be, assaulted,” the document reads.
Several of the indigenous people in the audience hailed from the Amazon and said they hoped the pope would help them protect land designated by the government as indigenous reserves but that farmers and ranchers illegally invade for timber and to graze cattle. In fact, grazing has been the top recent cause of deforestation in Brazil.
“We got credentials for his speech and attended so we could tell the pope what’s happening to our people,” said Levi Xerente, a 22-year-old member of the Xerente tribe in Tocantins state in the Amazon, after he attended the pope’s speech. “We hope that he will help intervene with the government and stop all the big public works projects that are happening in the region.”
Xerente, speaking in broken Portuguese, said the biggest threats to Indians in the region were big agribusiness invading land and the government’s own massive infrastructure projects, including the damming of rivers for hydroelectric power generation and roads being carved out of the forest, often to reach giant mines.
Francis thanked Brazilian bishops for maintaining a church presence in the rugged and vast Amazon, which is about the size of the United States west of the Mississippi River. But he pushed church leaders to refocus energies on the region.
“The church’s work needs to be further encouraged and launched afresh” in the Amazon, the pope said in prepared remarks, urging an “Amazonian face” for the church.
He cited the church’s long history of working in the region.
“The church’s presence in the Amazon basin is not that of someone with bags packed and ready to leave after having exploited everything possible,” he said. “The church has been present in the Amazon basin from the beginning … and is still present and critical to the area’s future.”
Catholic priests and nuns have taken up the causes of Indians and of poor subsistence farmers in the Amazon, often putting themselves in danger. Violent conflicts over land rights are common in the region, where wealthy farmers and ranchers are known to hire gunmen to intimidate people into leaving land the government has often set aside as reserves for their use.
In 2005, U.S. nun and Amazon land-rights defender Dorothy Stang was murdered by one such gunman in the state of Para. Two ranchers were later convicted of ordering her murder so they could control a parcel of land the government had ceded to a subsistence farming group Stang worked with.
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Associated Press writer Jenny Barchfield contributed to this report.
Good day, class. Today we’re going to learn about GMOs. Those three little letters have been in the news a lot lately, and most people don’t really know what it means. For example, today in our show prep meeting, I told the guys I was doing a story on GMOs and Ron said:
“What’s the ‘O’ stand for? Genetically Modified…O?”
Organism. Genetically Modified Oganism. It’s also called GE, Genetically Engineered.
This November, Washingtonians will vote on I-522 to decide if foods and seeds containing GMOs should be labeled at grocery and home and garden stores.
Trudy Bialic is director of public affairs for PCC Natural Markets. She wants the labeling. “Essentially all GMOs are either tolerating a pesticide or producing their own pesticide and insecticide. It’s engineered with properties that make the produce its own insecticide. You are eating a registered pesticide.”
GMOs can currently be found in some zucchini and yellow squash and sweet corn, which means they often show up in processed foods that contain corn syrup. But Trudy isn’t taking a stand on whether GMOs are good or bad. She simply wants the products labeled.
“I-522 is really about labeling,” says Trudy. “It’s not about the science. Labeling gives us transparency and it gives us, as shoppers, the ability to decide for ourselves what’s appropriate and best for us to buy and feed our families.”
But not everyone wants the labels. Dana Beiber is the spokesperson for the No on 522 campaign.
“We already have a labeling system that works perfectly,” Dana says. “For folks who want to avoid foods with GE ingredients in them, they can do so by looking for the organic label. So it’s not necessary. The other reason it’s not necessary to put a warning label on these foods is because we’ve been eating them for decades and we have overwhelming scientific research that tells us that the foods are safe.
She says farmers will either have to spend money on a new label, that’s specific to Washington state, or change the ingredients in their product.
“I think it’s consumers who are really gonna end up paying the bill for us,” Dana says. “We can expect our grocery bills to go up by hundreds of dollars per year to pay for this unnecessary labeling system.”
Trudy says 64 countries and a few other states have already passed GMO labeling laws.
“Two-thirds of Washingtonians support labeling of genetically engineered foods. There are only five corporations that are funding the opposition. Five! They’re protecting their profits. Their concern is not the right to know for all Washingtonians. We all should know what’s in our food.”
We already label products with their fat and sodium content, we list all the ingredients, so what’s the harm in alerting consumers to GMOs?
“The fat or the sodium or whether it has eggs or peanuts in it, all that’s placed on every label throughout the country. It’s also on the back of the product. It’s not a warning label on the front of the product. Make no mistake, 522 is a warning label. In fact, the proponents have said they want it to be a skull and crossbones label on the front of a package.”
The spokesperson from Yes on I-522 says they have no intention of using a skull and crossbones, just a simple couple of words.
Gale Courey Toensing, Indian Country Today Media Network
A standing-room-only audience filled the auditorium of the Grand Bibliotheque (Great Library) in Montreal on July 30 for the world premiere of filmmaker Pierre Bastien’s new feature-length documentary, Paroles Amerikoises (“Ameriquois” Lyrics). The screening kicked off the 23rd First Peoples Festival, which takes place through August 5 at various venues in downtown Montreal and at Kahnawake, the nearby Mohawk territory across the St. Lawrence River.
Bastien’s film is about a unique gathering of Native and non Native writers — poets, essayists and novelists — who were invited to meet by Innu poet Rita Mestokosho at Ekuanitshit (“where things run aground”), an Innu community of just over 500 people. The film shifts between views of the Romaine River and its surrounding landscape and the writers, who inhabit the same vast geographical, economic and cultural territory, talking in an attempt to find a common ground based on “Ameriquois” identity.
The writers met over five days on the Romaine River. “It was a very deep encounter on the Romaine River, which is a very emblematic river,” Henri Welch, communications coordinator for the First Peoples Festival, explained. “Hydro Quebec [the publicly-owned electricity generating company] decided to build a dam on the river and naturally it was against the will of some of the indigenous communities and also some of the white people, who said we have no use for such a dam. The Romaine River is one of the best rivers we have in Quebec and it’s a tragedy to build a dam there.” Furthermore, Welsh said, Quebec, with its abundance of relatively inexpensive hydro-electricity, doesn’t need more electricity. “The only reason to build it is just to sell the extra electricity to the Yankees!” he said. “So the film is really important because it’s the story about [the dam], and it connects the Native and non-Native imaginations, and it was a crucial moment when people came together and expressed their thoughts and expressed many issues within their cultural range. It’s very, very beautiful.”
Filmmaker Pierre Bastien
Bastien, who is of Huron ancestry, said the group of aboriginal and Quebec writers formed around six years ago with the French language as the common organizing element. He was invited to join the group not as a filmmaker but as an artist whose opinions the group sought. “I brought my camera with me and I soon found myself immersed in the filmmaking process more than giving my opinion on things,” Bastien said. “I started filming and then I became this roaming eye, this seeing-all eye behind every one and [I was] listening and watching and looking more than talking.” As a filmmaker for more than 25 years, Bastien easily slipped into that role and made himself invisible. “I didn’t want the camera to be the star; I wanted it to be just like another person there. I tried to capture the spirit of the moment. Sometimes it’s like a bit of magic but you don’t always get that result.”
Paroles Amerikoises is Bastien’s fifth feature film. The film is currently in French only but Bastien said he hopes that the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network (APTN) will offer to translate it into English. Meanwhile, the film will go on French television in a shorter version because, Bastien said, “they never buy a 75 minute film.” From there, Bastien said, it would go on the indie film circuit to universities and film festivals.
Bastien succeeded greatly in being unobtrusive. The film captures the writers — Rita Mestokosho, Joséphine Bacon, Louis Hamelin, Jean Désy, Yves Sioui-Durand, Jean Morisset, Guy Sioui-Durand, and others — speaking in the most heartfelt way, unaffected by the presence of the camera. Among the most moving scenes is one in which the poet, filmmaker, and songwriter Josephine Bacon (Innu), talks about an elder who dreamed of returning to his territory: As he drummed he talked about a beautiful white-haired person that he longed for — the young people present thought he was talking about his wife, but he was really talking about his hunting territory in the wintertime when the land was covered in snow.
“[Bacon] is probably the wisest, most spiritual person in the group,” Bastien said. “She’s like a mother to us all and she plays a very important role in the culture here, in all cultures, she’s a very important artist figure.”
While the film documents the physical meeting on the Romaine River, it is as much about the meeting of minds in which the Native and non-Native writers talk about both geographical and cultural territories and the way to share them. “It’s about the power of artists on the territories and how, in Quebec, over 400 years, the population has become a uniquely Metis kind of people,” Bastien said. “Like [one of the writers] says in the film, ‘Our father was river and our mother was an Indian girl.” The statement references — poetically — how the pattern of French settlement in “New France” differed from English settlement in “New England.” The earliest French settlers were mostly single men who came as indentured laborers, and married Native women, which accounts for the enduring belief that a vast percentage of “white” Quebecers have Native ancestry. “Yes, they did marry Native women otherwise the white people would not have survived,” Bastien said. “So the mixing of the cultures — not so much of the blood but of the cultures — is a way to peace.”
The First Peoples Festival will continue through August 5 with more films, including the Canadian premiere of Winter in the Blood, an adaptation of the Blackfeet writer James Welch’s novel, starring Chaske Spencer. Most events including concerts at Festival Plaza are free. For more, see the full calendar of First Peoples’ Festival activities.
Early Head Start will be hosting an Art Auction on August 15, 2013. It will be held in the Early Head Start gymnasium, 7615 Totem Beach Rd Marysville, WA 98271, from 2-6 p.m.
Children’s artwork, from ages birth to 4 years old, will be auctioned off. The proceeds will go towards the Early Head Start end of the year celebration and for art supplies for the children’s classrooms.
Please come enjoy all the fine art that these children have made.
Native American Journalists Associaiton President Rhonda LeValdo speaks with Dr. George Blue Spruce about the state of dentistry in Indian country. Photo/Stan Bindell
TEMPE, Ariz.-Journalists covering Indian country received training and discussed Native American issues during the 29th annual National Native Media Conference in Tempe July 18-21.
The Native American Journalists Association (NAJA) and Native Public Media sponsored the conference.
The theme of this year’s conference was “Our voices, Our stories, Our future.” The conference was designed to empower native journalists and media professionals to tell their own stories. Journalism professionals lead sessions to train native journalists to tell their stories in a professional manner.
Arizona was well represented with journalists attending from the Navajo Hopi Observer, Navajo Times, Tutuveni and KUYI radio station among many others.
The issues those in attendance focused on included violence against women, dental care and the availability of radio frequencies for Indian communities.
Deborah Parker, vice chairwoman of the Tulalip Tribe in Washington state, fought successfully to have native women included in the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act. The act was signed into law this past year and promises sweeping changes in the way violent offenders on tribal land are held accountable.
Parker spoke about the legislative process and media coverage of the fight to protect women in Indian country.
“This is also an opportunity to teach our young people about laws, the past and what our future looks like,” she said.
When Parker first started to look into the Violence Against Women Act, people told her that it didn’t have the steam to include native women on reservations because “they have no face here.”
“That made me angry,” she said. “I could see all these faces that were from my bloodline.”
With the help of U.S. Sen Pat Murray, D-Wash. Parker put on a news conference and spoke about the lack of prosecutions of non-Indians committing crimes against women on reservations.
“It was amazing to be that voice,” she said. “The Senate was abuzz. How could they not include Native American women?”
Parker continued to work with the National Congress of American Indians to see the bill passed with inclusion of protecting native women. She said many racist comments came out of the House of Representatives. Some congressmen doubted whether Indian governments had the ability to arrest non-Indian men.
At the beginning of the process, she said one congressman was outspoken against the inclusion of Indian women, but Parker was able to get him to change his mind. She said the way to change the minds of elected officials is to personalize the stories.
“So many children, women and men came forward with what happened to them as children, teenagers and adults,” she said.
Tribes have until 2015 to implement the law with help from the U.S. Department of Justice.
One statistic states that 88 percent of crimes against women on reservations are committed by non-Indians. She said some congressmen did not believe that statistic.
Eric Cantor, R- Va., a conservative congressman, was one of those opposed to including native women in the law. When Parker met with Cantor’s aide, she told Parker that neither she nor the congressman had met a Native American.
“There are a lot in congress who don’t understand us politically, spiritually and traditionally,” she said.
Parker said she knows of several hundred women who have been murdered on reservations without any justice.
Parker said the media was a big help in covering the Violence Against Women Act.
Another topic at the conference was the crisis in rural America, including on reservations, where there are no oral health providers. Lack of dental services and dental problems can cause disease and sometimes death.
Indian Health Service’s dental provider vacancies average 20-30 percent.
Alaska natives have offered one solution by creating the Dental Health Aide Therapist program. Tribes could replicate the program in other parts of the country.
The Arizona School of Dentistry and Oral Health at A.T. Still University in Mesa recently graduated six American Indians to help fill the need.
Dr. George Blue Spruce, the first native dentist in Arizona, said the dental problem also includes a lack of Native American dentists.
Spruce, 82, said until Native Americans can go to a native dentist, Indian self-determination remains a myth.
The others leading this session included Dr. Todd Hartsfield, DDS faculty at A.T. Still; Maxine Brings Him Back-Janis, faculty at Northern Arizona University; Connie Murat, dental aide therapist at Yukon-Kuskokwim Health Corporation and Yvette Joseph, project manager at Kaufman and Associates. W.K. Kellogg Foundation sponsored the dental session.
Geoffrey Blackwell, chief of the Federal Communication Commission’s (FCC) Office of Native Affairs and Policy, announced that those seeking non-commercial radio stations on reservations can apply for low frequency FM radio stations between Oct. 15 and Oct. 29.
President Barack Obama recently signed the Local Community Radio Act, which mandates expansion of low power FM radio stations that provide listening areas of three to 10 miles.
Since 2000, the government has licensed more than 800 low power FM stations.
A session also took place on the importance of bringing more broadband services to reservations. Those leading this session included Loris Taylor from Native Public Media; Traci Morris from Homaholta Consulting, Michael Copps, from the FCC and Blackwell.
Taylor, a member of the Hopi Tribe, said in order for native radio stations to be successful they need champions on the inside who are non-Indians. She pointed to Coppes as one such champion.
Coppes said that better broadband means more money creating more jobs, education and health care. He said that broadband services throughout the U.S. are not as good as they should be.
“It’s not just Native Americans. Everybody in the country is being held back, especially in the rural villages. We need a sense of mission,” he said.
Blackwell said broadband is as important as roads and water. He said the FCC and tribes need to work together on bringing more broadband services to Indian country.
Blackwell noted that local radio stations continue to provide life saving services such as announcing when tornadoes will hit.
“Lives can be on the line when you can’t get a signal,” he said.
Blackwell said his office works with 50 Indian tribes at any given time. He hopes that his office will soon announce that there will be consultations and trainings to bring more broadband to Indian country this coming fiscal year.
Tim Giago was one of the founders of NAJA and one of the many elder journalists who received recognition during the conference. He founded the Lakota Times in 1981 when the Pine Ridge Reservation was located in the poorest county in America.
Giago, 80, had his office firebombed, his office windows shot out and his life threatened, but he continued publishing until he sold the paper in 1998.
Giago urged the young journalists not to get discouraged. He also offered them some advice.
“You can do a thousand good things, but if you do one bad thing that is what will be remembered,” he said.
ANADARKO, Oklahoma – A power struggle between factions of the Apache Indian Tribe of Oklahoma has spilled into the operation of an Anadarko Casino operated by the Tribe.
About 60 employees of the Silver Buffalo Casino say they were supposed to get paychecks last Friday. But they haven’t gotten those checks.
They say the casino gave them each $200 in cash Monday, but that doesn’t come close to covering what is owed to them.
Donnie Cabannis says he’s chairman of Oklahoma’s Apache Tribe, and that the casino workers are getting stiffed because his rivals have stolen money that was intended for them.
“There’s a lot of corruption going on in our casinos now, and we need to take control of that,” he said Tuesday.
However, Tribal Administrator Ernest Redbird says Cabannis is no longer the Chairman. And he says Cabannis’ claim that money has been stolen is not true.
“I think um there’s been miscommunication of money being transferred from one bank to another,” he said.
Late Tuesday, we were told those casino workers would finally get their paychecks at 2 p.m. Wednesday afternoon.
I suppose it wasn’t really until I was standing on the west side of Hoboken, N.J., in water and oil up to my thigh, that climate change really made sense. And it wasn’t until I was out organizing on New York City’s outer beaches after Hurricane Sandy that I understood my sluggishness on climate justice was nothing short of climate change denial.
It seems like everywhere we turn, we’re being fed the same old climate Armageddon story. You’ve heard it, I’m sure: If we continue to be dependent on fossil fuels, hundreds of gigatons of CO2 will continue to pour into the atmosphere, the temperature will rise above 2 degrees Celsius, and we’re done. There will be a biblical cocktail of hurricanes, floods, famines, wars. It will be terrifying, awful, epic and, yes, as far as any reputable scientist is concerned, those projections are for real.I call this narrative the Armageddon Complex, and my own denial was a product of it. I spun all sorts of stories to keep the climate crisis out of my life, ranging anywhere from “it can’t be that bad” to “if it is that bad, there’s nothing I can do about it,” and “it’s not my role. That’s for climate activists; I’m a different kind of activist.”
I did not act alone, but rather as part of a culture of climate denial among activists, who are already plagued by a tendency to see our work as separate issues vying for attention. The Armageddon Complex tells us that climate activism is about some far-off date, not about the pressing and time-sensitive needs that people around us experience in their day-to-day struggles. It pounds into us the idea that the crisis is more titanic than any other, so if we’re going to do anything about it, we have to doeverything. Most of us won’t put off the pressing needs of our families and communities for something we abstractly understand is going to happen later, and most of us aren’t willing to drop the other pieces of our lives and our movement to do everything, because we already feel like we’re doing everything and barely scraping by as it is. So we deny.
Unfortunately, there is a lot of truth to this story: The crisis is gargantuan, and it’s getting worse. Ultimately only a fundamental social, political, economic and personal transformation is going to get us out of this mess.
But that’s not the whole story. Climate Armageddon isn’t a Will Smith movie about what happens in 10 years when all hell breaks loose. Climate change is already here: Hurricanes that land on families, rising tides that flood homes, oil spills that drown communities and countless other disasters. These are caused by the same economic and political systems responsible for all the other crises we face — crises in which people are displaced from land, families are ripped out of homes, people lose their jobs, students sink into debt, and on and on.
Defeating climate change doesn’t have to mean dropping everything to become climate activists or ignoring the whole thing altogether. The truth is exactly the opposite: We have to re-learn the climate crisis as one that ties our struggles together and opens up potential for the world we’re already busy fighting for.
Climate moment, not climate movement
In addition to the hurricane were important voices that forced me to confront my denial. Naomi Klein has argued that resisting climate change is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to win the world we’ve wanted all along; the proponents of climate change are the same enemies that the Occupy movement and its counterparts around the world have already marked. Vandana Shiva pushes us to see that the intersecting crises of food, climate and economy are all based on a common theme of debt, whileGeorge Monbiot reminds us that the oil profiteering that ruins our climate would be impossible were it not for the insidious relationship between money and politics. These connections mean that the homeowners and activists around the United States putting their bodies on the line to fight foreclosure, the students occupying their universities to fight tuition hikes, the activists fighting for campaign finance reform, the countless who stand up to war — these struggles are our best shot at a climate movement that can really win.
But I learned those same lessons, too, from people in struggle. Farmers in the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement fighting for their land are not so different from the Lubicon Cree in Northern Alberta, Canada, standing in the way of the Keystone XL pipeline that poisons their water, or the residents in Atlanta, Ga., trying to win their homes back from the banks. The working-class white West Virginians resisting fracking are in the same boat as the families in Far Rockaway whose kids’ lungs are infected from living in moldy homes after Hurricane Sandy. They have a lot in common with those in the South Bronx who have been fighting against pollution caused by big business for decades, or the mothers in Detroit who are building urban gardens to cope with food deserts. They’re not so different from the Indian women fighting Monsanto, or those resisting wars fought for oil, and on and on the connections go. We’re all connected by the climate crisis, and the opportunities it opens for us.
The fight for the climate isn’t a separate movement, it’s both a challenge and an opportunity for all of our movements. We don’t need to become climate activists, weare climate activists. We don’t need a separate climate movement; we need to seize the climate moment. Ultimately, our task is to create moments for our various movements that allow us to continue our different battles while also working in solidarity to strike at the roots of the systems beneath the symptoms.
Think Turkey and Brazil. Think Arab Spring, and the uprisings against austerity all over Europe. Think the student movements from Quebec to Chile. Think Occupy. These were collective uprisings that drew lines and demanded that people decide which side they were on. It’s our role to prepare for these kinds of “which side are you on?” moments for the climate by training and practicing, by re-focusing on the issues that connect us, by building institutions that can support us in long-term struggle. We don’t stop our other organizing or drop the many other pieces of our lives; we organize the people with whom we already stand in order to seize these moments when they come — to tell stories, take spaces, and challenge enemies of the climate.
Learning from hurricanes
In the New York City neighborhood of Far Rockaway, climate justice is common sense. What I had only read articles and books about before, I learned a thousand times over from people on the front lines of climate crisis after Hurricane Sandy.
As part of Occupy Sandy and the Wildfire Project, I joined the relief effort, which quickly became an organizing project — training, political education, and supporting the growth of a group that is now active across the Rockaways. Between contesting the city’s vision for a recovery, fighting against stop-and-frisk, and organizing against gentrification, the working-class, multiracial Far Rockaway Wildfire group knows that their task is about more than relief from a hurricane — it is also to deal with the crises that existed before the hurricane, and the systems underlying them.
The fight is about winning back the social safety net that has been slashed by the same economic and political elite that profits from fossil fuels. It’s about the wages that have shrunk as elites have profited, about the jobs working people have lost as the bosses have been bailed out. It’s about ensuring sustainable mass transit so people can get to work. It’s about affordable housing, a need that existed before the storm, made worse now by the threat of disaster capitalist schemes to knock down projects and replace them with beach-front condos. It’s about contesting a political system that uses moments of crisis to further disenfranchise working people and people of color. It’s about overturning an economic system that is wrecking the planet while turning a profit for the most powerful, putting 40 percent of the wealth of this country into the hands of 1 percent of the population. It’s about creating alternatives in our communities, while fighting to make those alternatives the norm.
When you’re out on those beaches in Far Rockaway it’s clear that there isn’t any far-off climate Armageddon to wait for. The hurricanes are already smashing down around us, and they’re the same hurricanes as the ones we have fought all along — systems like capitalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy that shape one another and all the values and institutions that govern our lives. By fighting those systems, we’re already the seeds of the climate movement we’ve been dreaming of. We only need to overcome our denial, find points of intersection in our struggles, and prepare for those moments in which people finally sit down or stand up in the critical intersections of human history. It won’t be long now.
