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In Alaska, Indigenous Voices Raised in the Struggle Between Life and Oil |
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Saturday, 15 October 2016 08:29 |
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Miller writes: "As a child, Princess Lucaj was mystified by the oil wells she saw while visiting Los Angeles and the La Brea Tar Pits. She imagined they were dinosaurs and wondered what they could be up to."
Princess Lucaj is a Gwich'in Athabascan writer, filmmaker, and advocate for the protection of the Porcupine caribou herd. (photo: Ryan Red Corn)
In Alaska, Indigenous Voices Raised in the Struggle Between Life and Oil
By Stephen Miller, YES! Magazine
15 October 16
For years, Congress has been pressed to permanently protect the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Will today’s indigenous-led climate movements finally seal the deal?
 s a child, Princess Lucaj was mystified by the oil wells she saw while visiting Los Angeles and the La Brea Tar Pits. She imagined they were dinosaurs and wondered what they could be up to.
Her mother explained: A long time ago, Mother Earth buried toxins deep in the ground to keep them from harming people. But now people are digging them up.
Since then, Lucaj, a member of the Gwich’in tribe of northern Alaska, said she has been plagued by the realization that “we are not living in harmony with the Earth.”
The oil and gas industry accounts for more than three-quarters of the Alaskan government's discretionary revenue, and the state has seen a near constant tug of war over land rights for extraction. An area of particular interest is the coastal plain of the federally designated Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) on the continent’s northern coast. The U.S. Geological Survey estimates this area may hold as much as 16 billion barrels of recoverable crude oil and natural gas.
It also holds enormous significance for the Gwich’in people. The coastal plain is essential birthing ground for the Porcupine caribou herd, on which the Gwich’in have traditionally depended for subsistence.
“We have a spiritual relationship with the herd that dates back thousands of years,” Lucaj said. “We take care of the herd, and the herd takes care of us.” Taking care of the herd means protecting critical ecosystems like the coastal plain, which provides the caribou with a safe haven to rear their young at the end of their 1,500-mile land migration—the longest of any land mammal.
Recognizing the ecological and cultural importance of this area, the federal government established the ANWR—19 million acres in total—in 1960 and expanded it in 1980, designating 8 million acres as protected wilderness, but deferring permanent protection of 1.5 million crucial acres of the coastal plain to future congressional approval. Since then, native groups, government, industry, and environmentalists have argued for their interests.
Writer, filmmaker, and former executive director of the Gwich’in Steering Committee, Lucaj is one of many who has worked to ensure the long-term health of the Porcupine herd—and ultimately the people who depend on it.
A cursory look at ANWR’s history shows how the refuge has been used as a political game piece: championed as an asset for economic and national security by Republican members of Congress and presidents who wished to see it open for drilling (“Drill baby, drill!”), and shakily protected by Democrats and moderate Republicans pressured by some tribes and environmentalists.
In January 2015, President Obama formally recommended that Congress permanently ban drilling across about 12 million acres of ANWR, including the coastal plain. His request was met with harsh criticism from conservative legislators, the most vocal of which has been Alaska Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski, who is up for re-election this November.
With the economic hard times Alaska is experiencing today, there is increased pressure to open the refuge for drilling. “We are in such a fiscal crisis, and legislators are grasping at straws because oil has always been the answer for everything,” Lucaj said. “It’s all we know how to do up here—or so they tell us.”
Many Alaskans have reputations for pride and stewardship of their land, and more recently those people with the longest connection to that land are being heard.
“Threats have always been lingering but we have a lot more momentum and public support across the nation, but also in Alaska,” Lucaj explained. She said the Sioux-led resistance to the Dakota Access pipeline has been a catalyst for movements across the country, elevating Indigenous voices that are calling for the protection and recognition of the importance of land.
Lucaj wrote the following essay for “We are the Arctic,” an anthology of voices connected to the ANWR region, published this year by Mountaineers Books.
The caribou calf slips out of the womb and onto the soft padding of the tundra. Steam rises off its body, new to the world, to air, to life on Earth. In these first few hours he will bond with his mother, learning how to suckle, how to identify her scent and voice. These hours are critical to the survival of mother and calf in a herd of thousands. It is the only time they will have alone together. We humans are not so different in the way we give birth. The basics needed for life to begin. A mother’s warm body full of milk and reassurance. A safe place. A warm cabin. A manger. A refuge.
All of us who overconsume must pay a price in the grand scheme of life. The coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is sacred ground, deemed so by the births of millions of animals over thousands of years. And my people, Gwich’in, are there today only because of the spiritual bond we have with the Porcupine caribou herd. In our culture the caribou give themselves to us so that we may survive. We are humbled. Each of us humans should walk with that humbleness, knowing that it is ultimately this massive cycle of life that provides us with what we need to survive: clean air and water, soil to grow our gardens, and the fish and wildlife on which many of us depend.
All life is sacred. We all want to live, to experience the gift of creation—this great mystery we are all a part of. Truly we are related. You and I are brother and sister. We are related to the caribou, and whales, and polar bears; we are even related to the birch trees, and the forget-me-nots, and the tundra grass. Shalak naii, my relatives—let us carry this knowledge in our hearts and minds as we continue on our respective journeys. And hai’choo to you who are working so tirelessly for our future generations!
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Obituary: Great Barrier Reef (25 Million BC-2016) |
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Friday, 14 October 2016 13:51 |
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Jacobsen writes: "The Great Barrier Reef of Australia passed away in 2016 after a long illness. It was 25 million years old."
Great Barrier Reef. (photo: National Geographic)
Obituary: Great Barrier Reef (25 Million BC-2016)
By Rowan Jacobsen, Outside Online
14 October 16
Climate change and ocean acidification have killed off one of the most spectacular features on the planet.
 he Great Barrier Reef of Australia passed away in 2016 after a long illness. It was 25 million years old.
For most of its life, the reef was the world’s largest living structure, and the only one visible from space. It was 1,400 miles long, with 2,900 individual reefs and 1,050 islands. In total area, it was larger than the United Kingdom, and it contained more biodiversity than all of Europe combined. It harbored 1,625 species of fish, 3,000 species of mollusk, 450 species of coral, 220 species of birds, and 30 species of whales and dolphins. Among its many other achievements, the reef was home to one of the world’s largest populations of dugong and the largest breeding ground of green turtles.
The reef was born on the eastern coast of the continent of Australia during the Miocene epoch. Its first 24.99 million years were seemingly happy ones, marked by overall growth. It was formed by corals, which are tiny anemone-like animals that secrete shell to form colonies of millions of individuals. Its complex, sheltered structure came to comprise the most important habitat in the ocean. As sea levels rose and fell through the ages, the reef built itself into a vast labyrinth of shallow-water reefs and atolls extending 140 miles off the Australian coast and ending in an outer wall that plunged half a mile into the abyss. With such extraordinary diversity of life and landscape, it provided some of the most thrilling marine adventures on earth to humans who visited. Its otherworldly colors and patterns will be sorely missed.
To say the reef was an extremely active member of its community is an understatement. The surrounding ecological community wouldn’t have existed without it. Its generous spirit was immediately evident 60,000 years ago, when the first humans reached Australia from Asia during a time of much lower sea levels. At that time, the upper portions of the reef comprised limestone cliffs and innumerable caves lining a resource-rich coast. Charlie Veron, longtime chief scientist for the Australian Institute of Marine Science and the Great Barrier Reef’s most passionate champion (he personally discovered 20 percent of the world’s coral species), called the reef in that era a “Stone Age Utopia.” Aboriginal clans hunted and fished its waters and cays for millennia, and continued to do so right up to its demise.
Worldwide fame touched the reef in 1770, when Captain James Cook became the first European to navigate its deadly maze. Although the reef was beloved by nearly all who knew it, Cook was not a fan. “The sea in all parts conceals shoals that suddenly project from the shore, and rocks that rise abruptly like a pyramid from the bottom,” he wrote in his journal. Cook’s ship foundered on one of those shoals and was nearly sunk, but after several months Cook escaped the reef.
After that, the reef was rarely out of the spotlight. A beacon for explorers, scientists, artists, and tourists, it became Australia’s crown jewel. Yet that didn’t stop the Queensland government from attempting to lease nearly the entire reef to oil and mining companies in the 1960s—a move that gave birth to Australia’s first conservation movement and a decade-long “Save the Reef” campaign that culminated in the 1975 creation of Great Barrier Reef Marine Park, which restricted fishing, shipping, and development in the reef and seemed to ensure its survival. In his 2008 book, A Reef in Time, Veron wrote that back then he might have ended his book about the reef with “a heartwarming bromide: ‘And now we can rest assured that future generations will treasure this great wilderness area for all time.’” But, he continued: “Today, as we are coming to grips with the influence that humans are having on the world’s environments, it will come as no surprise that I am unable to write anything remotely like that ending.”
In 1981, the same year that UNESCO designated the reef a World Heritage Site and called it “the most impressive marine area in the world,” it experienced its first mass-bleaching incident. Corals derive their astonishing colors, and much of their nourishment, from symbiotic algae that live on their surfaces. The algae photosynthesize and make sugars, which the corals feed on. But when temperatures rise too high, the algae produce too much oxygen, which is toxic in high concentrations, and the corals must eject their algae to survive. Without the algae, the corals turn bone white and begin to starve. If water temperatures soon return to normal, the corals can recruit new algae and recover, but if not, they will die in months. In 1981, water temperatures soared, two-thirds of the coral in the inner portions of the reef bleached, and scientists began to suspect that climate change threatened coral reefs in ways that no marine park could prevent.
By the turn of the millennium, mass bleachings were common. The winter of 1997–98 brought the next big one, followed by an even more severe one in 2001–02, and another whopper in 2005–06. By then, it was apparent that warming water was not the only threat brought by climate change. As the oceans absorbed more carbon from the atmosphere, they became more acidic, and that acid was beginning to dissolve the living reef itself.
Concerned for the reef’s health, a number of friends attempted interventions—none more poignant than Veron’s famed 2009 speech to London’s 350-year-old Royal Society titled “Is the Great Barrier Reef on Death Row?” Veron quickly answered his own question in the affirmative: “This is not a fun talk to give, but I’ve never given a more important talk in my life,” he told the premier gathering of scientists, accurately predicting that atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations of 450 parts per million (which the world will reach in 2025) would bring about the demise of the reef.
No one knows if a serious effort could have saved the reef, but it is clear that no such effort was made. On the contrary, attempts to call attention to the reef’s plight were thwarted by the government of Australia itself, which in 2016, shortly after approving the largest coal mine in its history, successfully pressured the United Nations to remove a chapter about the reef from a report on the impact of climate change on World Heritage sites. Australia’s Department of the Environment explained the move by saying, “experience had shown that negative comments about the status of World Heritage-listed properties impacted on tourism.” In other words, if you tell people the reef is dying, they might stop coming.
By then, the reef was in the midst of the most catastrophic bleaching event in its history, from which it would never recover. As much as 50 percent of the coral in the warmer, northern part of the reef died. “The whole northern section is trashed,” Veron told Australia’s Saturday Paper. “It looks like a war zone. It’s heartbreaking.” With no force on earth capable of preventing the oceans from continuing to warm and acidify for centuries to come, Veron had no illusions about the future. “I used to have the best job in the world. Now it’s turned sour... I’m 71 years old now, and I think I may outlive the reef.”
The Great Barrier Reef was predeceased by the South Pacific’s Coral Triangle, the Florida Reef off the Florida Keys, and most other coral reefs on earth. It is survived by the remnants of the Belize Barrier Reef and some deepwater corals.
In lieu of flowers, donations can be made to Ocean Ark Alliance.
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FOCUS: Journalist Amy Goodman Shouldn't Be Arrested for Covering Dakota Pipeline Story |
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Friday, 14 October 2016 10:17 |
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Taibbi writes: "The journalism business is designed to make telling the truth difficult."
Dakota Access Pipeline protestor being treated after pepper sprayed by private security contractors on land being graded for the oil pipeline, near Cannon Ball, North Dakota. (photo: Robyn Beck/Getty)
Journalist Amy Goodman Shouldn't Be Arrested for Covering Dakota Pipeline Story
By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
14 October 16
To the offending prosecutor, Ladd Erickson, who is apparently a fan
little over a month ago, private security guards working on behalf of the Dakota Access pipeline company clashed with Native Americans. They were protesting the bulldozing of land on a Standing Rock Sioux tribal burial site in southern North Dakota.
Guards sprayed protesters with pepper spray and unleashed attack dogs on the crowd – which included children – in a reprehensible example of corporate violence.
Filming the protests in North Dakota that day was a crew from Democracy Now! The show's award-winning anchorwoman Amy Goodman conducted interviews during the protests and covered the dog attacks as they unfolded. The show's subsequent special report about the incident went viral, with more than 14 million people viewing it on Facebook.
Shortly thereafter, the Obama administration intervened, stopping pipeline construction on Army Corps land and asking the company to "voluntarily pause all construction activity" in the area.
This victory for the Standing Rock Sioux would likely not have been possible without the aggressive independent reporting of Democracy Now!, whose pictures created significant public pressure.
On September 8th, five days after the events, local authorities took the incredible step of filing criminal trespassing charges against Amy.
Prosecutor Ladd Erickson argued publicly that Amy was not acting as a journalist at the time of the protests.
"She's a protester, basically. Everything she reported on was from the position of justifying the protest actions," he said.
Erickson added that he was distressed that Goodman had not mentioned alleged assaults on guards, or trespassing.
A Hawaii-based attorney named Teresa Tico wrote Erickson to complain. She first asked if he had been quoted correctly when he pooh-poohed Goodman's status as a journalist. She also hailed Goodman's career and hastened to reassure Erickson that Amy is, in fact, a reporter.
This, weirdly enough, is where my name comes up in this story. Erickson wrote back to Tico and said:
"One of my favorite writers is Matt Taibbi from Rolling Stone and I try to track his stuff. Ms. Goodman has interviewed him a couple times that I have seen and that is my primary source for knowing who she is."
Democracy Now! passed on this strange note and asked for comment.
I don't normally like to disagree with anyone possessing the excellent judgment to be a regular reader of mine, but Erickson is dead wrong here.
Amy Goodman was clearly acting as a reporter at the protest. Moreover, she's as close to the ideal of what it means to be a journalist as one can get in this business.
I was actually with Amy in Toronto when she got news of the arrest. Ironically, she was being recognized at the premiere of All Governments Lie, a film about journalists carrying on the independent muckraking tradition of I.F. Stone.
I first heard of Amy Goodman almost twenty years ago, when the United States was commencing its war in Kosovo. Amy and Jeremy Scahill were due to receive an award from the Overseas Press Club for Drilling and Killing: Chevron and Nigeria's Oil Dictatorship, ironically a film about the violent behavior of a rapacious energy firm.
Richard Holbrooke, the American ambassador to the U.N. and Bill Clinton's special envoy to Yugoslavia, was giving the keynote address at the Overseas Press Club event. Amy and Jeremy tried to take the opportunity to ask him challenging questions about America's aggressive behavior in the run up to war.
But when Scahill stood up after Holbrooke's speech and tried to ask the question, he was shouted down by all the "respectable" journalists from the networks and the major news dailies. Scahill specifically asked Tom Brokaw and Leslie Stahl to support him.
Brokaw instead stood up in between Holbrooke and Scahill, told Jeremy to sit down, then went on to have dinner with Holbrooke at his table. The New York Post the next day wrote: "BROKAW SHUSHES KOSOVO CRANK."
I tell this story because it's a key to understanding the difference between Amy Goodman and someone like Tom Brokaw, whom I'm sure Mr. Erickson would describe as a journalist no matter where he chose to take pictures.
The journalism business is designed to make telling the truth difficult. There are a lot of obstacles.
In return for access to high-ranking politicians, the government typically charges a little bit of your honesty.
In return for the large sums of money advertisers pay to major network news operations, you have to give up a little bit more.
Then there's audience. In order to secure a big one, you sometimes need to give up still a little bit more of your soul.
The easiest route to a big audience is a commercial network operation that piggybacks on the popularity of its other programming, like sports and sitcoms. Go that route and you are beholden not only to your own advertisers, but those supporting those other programs.
The other route to a big audience is designing a program that tells people what they want to hear, which usually ends in not challenging your viewers/readers at crucial moments.
So if your primary interest is in doing this job correctly, you usually have to give up the access, the money and the audience.
You can go without the first two and still do a good enough job. But to have an impact, you have to reach people. So you have to find another way.
Amy Goodman found another way. She insisted on her complete independence throughout her entire career.
Moreover she was never satisfied with merely doing the job and not having an impact. She essentially built her own large television news operation, and she did it precisely for moments like the Standing Rock protest.
The whole point of fighting to be independent for your whole career, and building your own news network instead of working at someone else's existing, corporate-funded one, is so that you can cover something like the Dakota Pipeline story whenever you feel like it.
So not only was Amy Goodman doing journalism when she was at those protests, the only kind of journalist who would even be there almost by definition would have to be one like Amy Goodman.
That's not to say more commercial-minded outlets can't or don't cover pipeline controversies, or the misdeeds of powerful energy companies. They just tend not to, for some reason.
In post-communist Russia, I watched as new press freedoms quickly faded due to intimidation by government officials and mafia figures. A few of my Russian colleagues were beaten and even killed at the dawn of the Putin era.
We don't have to deal with anything like that in America, thankfully, and this is not remotely the same thing.
But a prosecutor who arrests a reporter because he doesn't think she's "balanced" enough is basically telling future reporters what needs to be in their stories to avoid arrest. This is totally improper and un-American. We have enough meddling editors in this country without also recruiting government officials to the job.
Mr. Erickson, thanks sincerely for reading, but please drop the charges.
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The Republican Party Is Trapped in a Worst-Case Scenario |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=6853"><span class="small">Frank Rich, New York Magazine</span></a>
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Friday, 14 October 2016 08:50 |
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Rich writes: "Let's face it: In the aftermath of the Access Hollywood video and the stampede of overdue defections it inspired among GOP office holders, many party leaders were predicting (and perhaps secretly rooting for) the debate to be the final straw."
Donald Trump. (photo: Getty)
The Republican Party Is Trapped in a Worst-Case Scenario
By Frank Rich, New York Magazine
14 October 16
Most weeks, New York Magazine writer-at-large Frank Rich speaks with contributor Alex Carp about the biggest stories in politics and culture. Today: the second 2016 presidential debate.
fter a weekend of high-profile GOP defections and whispers that the RNC might try to nudge him off the ticket, Donald Trump went into last night’s debate with his campaign, and his party, seemingly in free fall. Did the debate change the momentum?
Yes. While Clinton’s momentum likely continues on the upswing, the momentum building steadily over the weekend among Republican elites to finally dump Trump once and for all was slowed. And that is the worst possible news for the GOP. Trump is still on the same downward spiral that he was before the debate — he was behind by 12 points in Pennsylvania and 3 in Florida in a Wall Street Journal/NBC News/Marist poll completed last week before Friday’s bombshell — but now the odds have increased that more down-ballot Republican candidates, unable to escape his death grip on the party, will join him on history’s junk heap.
Let’s face it: In the aftermath of the Access Hollywood video and the stampede of overdue defections it inspired among GOP office holders, many party leaders were predicting (and perhaps secretly rooting for) the debate to be the final straw. An apocalyptic Trump on-camera train wreck would finally give the national party permission to abandon Trump entirely, even if it couldn’t force him to withdraw, and put all hands and funds on deck to salvage any other races it can. But Trump didn’t oblige by having a complete and utter meltdown onstage.
His performance, don’t get me wrong, was both nasty and ridiculous. He couldn’t stay on any subject, could not offer any policy specifics, made stuff up and lied with abandon, threatened to throw his opponent in jail by dictatorial fiat once in the White House, whined wimpily about the moderators, and lurched around the set Rick Lazio style in an invasive manner both menacing and weird. He mentioned Sidney Blumenthal so often and yet incoherently that his only point seemed to be to invoke the Jewishness of his name. He again proclaimed his racist conviction that all American blacks live in uniformly hellish inner cities. He claimed to be against Islamophobia even as he broadly portrayed America’s Muslim communities as terrorist enclaves.
But for all that, he did not deliver on the promise implicit in the grotesque spectacle he mounted just ahead of the debate — his creepy parading of Bill Clinton’s accusers as if they were in a hostage video. Though he made plenty of accusations about the Clintons’ marital and sexual history, he stopped short of an unhinged Joe McCarthy–esque self-immolation. That modicum of restraint allowed him to clear the low bar that was set for him by Republican leaders and robbed them of the pretext they needed to cut him loose. Not without reason did the Washington bureau chief of the Journal, the paper of choice among Republican elites, certify this morning that Trump’s debate performance has put him “back on his feet.” So much for the weekend rumors (or fantasies) that Mike Pence might lead a full-scale party revolt by quitting the ticket.
At the same time, Trump did absolutely nothing that would win over the critical voters who have abandoned him, starting with Republican women. So the GOP is trapped in the worst-case scenario: It is still encumbered with a presidential candidate poised to lose big time, but it has no means to free itself of that albatross without alienating the loyal Trump voters (a.k.a. the party’s base) who cheered the debate and are needed to turn up for the other candidates on the ballot. Checkmate. Even if another incendiary Trump video surfaces now, it is too late for the GOP to wriggle out of the suicide pact it made with the devil.
Hillary Clinton received praise for her poise in the face of what commentators are calling the “ugliest debate in American history,” but she didn’t land a knockout punch. What should she have done differently?
She was workmanlike at best, and possibly thrown off her superior first-debate game by the hand grenade Trump detonated just before last night’s bout. But I think her strategy was the right one: Let Trump be Trump, and get out of his way. The good news for her, and it’s very good news, is that the new WikiLeaks revelations, which would have been devastating during the primary run against Bernie Sanders, and possibly damaging to her chances in the general election were she running against a skillful candidate, have been almost completely drowned out by the latest and loudest Trump scandal. There is more than a little embarrassing material in the passages from the Goldman Sachs speeches that emerged in the hacked emails, some of it confirming one’s worst fears that she is more loyal to her Wall Street donors than to the Sanders-Warren reforms she has paid lip service to in the campaign. And when the subject came up in the debate, it was clear she has no good answer. Her rationalization of her seeming hypocrisy was utter nonsense of a sort you’d expect from Trump: She tried to pass the buck to Abe Lincoln, of all people, or at least Lincoln as fictionalized in Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln. But it didn’t matter. Trump was too poorly prepared and inexact to bring home the case, and the nation has moved on to a sexual-assault scandal that is more gripping and accessible than whatever water Clinton has carried and, worse, might continue to carry for her friends at Goldman Sachs.
Though the Friday release of Trump’s Access Hollywood tape was widely received as the reason for his skid, some social scientists have begun to argue the opposite: that a growing realization that Trump was not going to win left many Republicans looking for a plausible exit. Considering everything else Trump has said and done during this campaign, why did these comments break the dam?
There’s something to be said for that argument: Trump has been going down since the first debate and this poisonous video was just a handy way for cynical fence-straddlers in tough senatorial reelection races, like John McCain and Kelly Ayotte, to finally jump ship to try to save themselves. After all, given the endless list of other Trump atrocities, including his well-known and much detailed history of insulting, demeaning, and hitting upon women, what was new here? The 2005 video wasn’t a smoking gun, merely a graphic confirmation of what has already been widely reported.
Nonetheless there was something about the video that was particularly disgusting. It wasn’t just that we heard Trump say beastly things clearly and repeatedly in his own distinctive voice. What struck me most about the three-minute video — and which is why it must be watched, not just listened to or read in transcript — is the chilling second half, where Trump and his equally offensive buddy, the television “personality” and NBC News “journalist” Billy Bush, emerge from the bus to meet Arianne Zucker, the actor who was there to greet them before Trump did a stunt cameo on the soap opera Days of Our Lives. Bush functions as a pimp, insisting that Zucker hug the Donald, then presses her to express her sexual ardor for them both. It’s not a sexual assault on the level of those Trump brags about on the bus, but it feels like a sexual violation all the same.
It is an irony of sorts that a presidential candidate who had falsely accused a Miss Universe of appearing in a sex tape was revealed as the participant in a real, and ugly, sex tape of his own just a week later. Polls already show that few Republicans have defected from Trump because of it, evangelical Christian leaders included. But I’m increasingly persuaded that their loyalty will come at the price of the decimation of their party on Election Day.
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t ain’t over until the portly gentleman screams, but it is, as intelligence analysts say, highly likely that Hillary Clinton will win this election. Poll-based models put her chances at around 90 percent earlier this week — and that was before the campaign turned totally X-rated.
