Why We Have to Do Something

unning out the door on a seven to ten day trip to report a story having to do with the increasingly sociopathic modern social environment.

Leaving stacks of clips to be blogged on and filed. Boy could I use an intern or two. Anyway, here are some recent developments in the ever-changing pictures of what’s happening to the world that have come to my attention mainly from my daily morning perusal of the Gazette that I just want to share with y’all before I take off.

The coverage of climate change by the media in Canada has declined by 80% because government climate scientists are being muzzled. They now have to submit requests for interviews to their supervisors, and their answers have to be approved. This is all about the oil sands. The Tory government, led by prime minister Stephen Harper, the son of an Alberta oil executive (Imperial), wants to double the production of the horribly polluting and greenhouse gas emitting oil sands, the greatest environmental horror show on earth, which I will soon be posting an epic Dispatch about. The government is giving more money in tax breaks to one of the companies in the sands, Total, than it is spending on environmental protection in the whole country  The oil sands are Canada’s ticket to the big-time. The country had a taste of being a superpower two years ago, and it wants to be one, now and forever,  bad and maybe its time has come. The Globe and Mail, March 19, says that oil sands production is going to proceed at an “unbelievable pace” over the next three years, doubling to $16.1 billion annually fromn its current $8.1 billion. 15,000 new jobs will be created. A year ago when Obama said the U.S. wasn’t going to buy dirty foreign oil (even thought we were getting and continue to get 1.1 million barrels a day of hevy crude fro the oil sands), the oil sand executives were very contrite and promises to clean up their act, but they just laid low for a couple of months until it blew over and did nothing. then came back with a vengeance.

I said that the economic meltdown has caused a dramatic reduction in emissions, but a new reading from a polar station in Norway has found that they have risen slightly. How much does this represent what is happening world-wide. Apparently while oil consumption is down in the West, emissions are rising in the developing countries  as their populations grow and more  adopt  the modern lifestyle. 20% of modern world emissions are supposedly from Internet use.

Spring has arrived weeks early. It’s been an oddly mild and truncated winter. The wussiest winter Canadians can remember. more global warming evidence staring us all in the face. the antiwarmist got some traction from the blizzard in D.C. and we need to get some traction from this.

So the deterioration and disintegration of our natural systems continues, and the massive scientific evidence about it keeps coming in, and so does the denial and disinformation and trashing. Bill McKibben has a clever analysis of the tactics of the anti-warmists : as in the O.J. trial where Johnie Cochran had to do some fancy footwork because his client was obviously guilty, so he attacked the system that was trying it, especially the racism of Mark Fuhrman, and played on the jury’s dislike of the LAPD, so the anti-warmists have made Dr. Phil Jones of the British climate Centre their Mark Fuhrman, using his compromising venting in what he thought were private e-mails to tar the entire science of climate change, diverting our attentionb from the real issue, that the climate is obviously damaged  and weather systems and  jetstreams are obviously out of whack.

Paul McFedries  wordspy.com> has information on other technique the anti0warmist righties are using. like infoganda n. A fake or misleading news story designed to further a hidden agenda. [Blend of information and propaganda.]

So musiclovers, ecowarriors, and tide-buckers, what is the unmistakeable conclusion to be drawn from these various pieces of information ? we got haveta get our act together.

sometimes you gotta buck the tide : morningraga15

recorded last nite at Bob Olivier’s studio.

lyrics and vocals : Suitcase

producer and base : Bob Olivier

drummer : Tonio Morin-Vargas, guitar : Laurent Racine, both of the band La Racine Rose

recording and editing : Bistra

We debated whether to keep the last couplet, which my teenage boys and their rapper pal Joseph came up with,

and decided to, because many of the most important voices for the environment are a bit too sanctimonious and goody-goody

in my and a lot of other people’s opinions. A little transgressiveness and sacrilege (accent grave over the e, I don’t know how to do it),

seems to be in order. We need to shake things up, and this is the idiom of the hip hop crowd, and the teens and twentysomethings are

one of the main target groups of our call to action, because they are the future, and every other word that comes out of their mouths is mothafucka

so let’s not get bent out of shape about this. Bob thinks we should record many versions of the song, get new musicians into his studio every week

and see what they do with it. Keep ya posted. Meantime, keep the ball rolling with our burgeoning movement and do what you can. Every little bit

helps. Petit a petit l’oiseau fait son nid.

01 Track 01 1

the response to our call to action

is global and phenomenal and very moving. We are connecting with some wonderful human beings. Please keep the ball rolling musiclovers. If you resonate to the call and believe in the cause of saving our world, please send it to twenty core  friends who you know also believe in it and will act, and tell them to do the same. This is sort of like a chain letter or a Ponzi scheme for a good cause. Keep it going and you will be rewarded with 60 virgins or hunks, as the case may be. I’m considering becoming the Rush Limbaugh of global warming. Somebody’s gotta give em a blast of their own hot air.

So what do we do now ? We’ve started a new section in the Dispatches called Ecowarriors, where we can process and elaborate and collaborate with all the people who are expressing their solidarity and offering their services. There’s a sub-section for comments and suggestions, teckie, organizational, or anything else constructive (no comments on my singing voice, please, I know it sucks). This is all very new to us and we’re still feeling our way, so any advice is welcome.

The problem with liberal movements of the left is they are usually all over the place and not organized, and  guys who are on power trips take over and use the revolution for their own advancement and it ends up being betrayed. The sociopaths are not only conservative, and the worst killers have in fact been sociopaths of the left like Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and Siad Barre. The ecowarriors and tide-buckas who are answering the call may agree on the cause, which is to save our world, but not much else, so getting everybody on the same page is not going to be easy, especially when the actual text of the page hasn’t even been written.

Take me and my son Andre, the designer and manager of the Dispatches. He doesn’t really like calling us Ecowarriors, because it sounds belligerent and confrontational, and he doesn’t think going to war with the right is going to solve anything. He’s involved in a battle between right and leftwing orv users over how overland expeditions should be done in the desert Southwest. I’m joining him on a fabulous historic trip through remote roadless desert in Utah and Arizona in April which I will be blogging for on the Dispatches. There will be some Republicans with us, some Democrats, and some apolitical types. A lot of his buddies are Republicans and great guys. He’s made some Mormon friends for life through their mutual interest in orvs and or’ing. It’s true.  Not all conservatives are sociopaths. I know some great Mormons. Andre says this red and blue polarization of our society is unfortunate. Eventually it becomes chronic, like Colombia where they’re been killing each other for two hundreds years, or the Israelis and the Palestinians, which will never be solved.  The environmental movement was in fact started by Republicans like Teddy Roosevelt and the people I grew up with in Bedford, New York in the fifities who started the Nature Conservancy and the National Audubon Society and the Garden Club of America. These were fantastic people, who lived by the code of the gentleman and felt a sense of noblesse oblige and stewardship for the natural world. Some of them left their estates not to their offspring but to be preserved as forever undevelopable nature sanctuaries. The environmental movement was, Andre maintains, nonpartisan when Earth Day l970, still the greatest gathering in U.S. history, happened. (I’m not so sure about that. Us hippies were pretty het up about the “military-industrial complex” and horrible events they were perpetrating like the huge oil spill in San Francisco Bay which I helped clean up.) And you know who started the EPA, Andre reminds me– Nixon. We enviros share part of the blame for the partisanization of the movement. Jimmie Carter imposed a 55 mile an hour speed limit, four years after the gas crisis, and that didn’t go over with America at all. It cramped our style.  So Reagan ran as an anti-enviro and won.

But they are the enemy now, I argue, and we have to do something. The environmental movement is stalled, stymied, sabotaged. We are losing the battle for the planet, for the hearts and minds of the modern world. Here in Canada coverage of climate change has fallen by 80% this year because the government scientists aren’t allowed to talk to the media without permission from their supervisors, and their answers have to be vetted. Why is this ? Because the government sees the Alberta oil sands as Canada’s ticket to the big-time. They had a taste of being a superpower two years ago, and they liked it, and they want it again. Prime Minister Harper is the son of an Imperial oil executive and the capital of Alberta is not really Calgary, but Houston. More to come.

sometimes you gotta buck the tide

you gotta buck the tide
when the tide really sucks like now
you gotta buck the tide

when you washing up on the sand and stranded
you gotta buck the tide

when all hope of change all chance for improvement
is goin down the drain
you gotta buck the tide

this definitely not one of our better moments
not one of our finest hours
we’re losing the battle for the planet
to the dark powers

when apathy indifference and ignorance
are the order of the day
you gotta buck the tide

when everything you believe in
and who you are is being pulled out to sea
and drowned
you gotta buck the tide

you gotta decide
if you’re gonna be part of the problem
or the solution
are you gonna put up with any more of this
air water and mind pollution
you gonna join this revolution
or sit there twiddling your thumbs
and know that what’s happening
or what’s not happening ain’t right.

you gotta buck the tide
you gotta take a side
there’s nowhere left to hide
you gotta take some pride
in what you doing here

don’t let the people who like it the way it is
take you for a ride
expose their dirty tricks and disinformation
Recognize when you being lied to
stand up and face the nation

so what’s it gonna be mothafucka
you gonna sit there fat dumb and happy
or you gonna be a tide-bucka ?

(The lyrics so far, last verse contributed by my teenage boys and their rapper friend Joseph.)

Thanks for the email. I wish that this project will work.

Did you ever heard about Avaaz.org? They are pretty clever with the
use of new medias for mobilization. They even organized a fake press
conference prior the climate conference in Copenhagen
(http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/10/hoax-avaaz-chamber.php).

Take care

Louis

Wow what a treat to come back from my trip and find an email that i actually want to read …

Alex: This arrived from friend Norman after I forwarded your most
recent message to him.  Norman, who was born in the Philippine Islands,
lives in northern Canada with his wife Hilah (who was trained as a
geologist).  When I met him in the early 1960s he was the ranger in charge
of the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge in southwestern Arizona on the
Mexican border.  He was working on his master’s degree in wildlife
management and ultimately wrote his thesis on the Desert Bighorn.  Soon
afterwards he got hired by the Canadians to work in the frozen north and,
I’m assuming, subsequently became a Canadian citizen.  His message shows the
kinds of things that can be accomplished if only the match falls on dry
tinder.
Bunny in Tucson

\   /
0
_(    )_

Howdy Bunny,

Thanks for the poop on the blog written by your friend Alex.  I hasten to
respond because if you are going to send my e-letter to him about my work
with schools in Peru, I should give you the full story of the program which
my Peruvian colleagues and I refer to as Dream Number Two.  (Dream Number
One is a scholarship my family set up for the best graduate students in the
University at which I taught so that they could get out into the field to do
their MSc research.  Previously poverty prevented field work and MSc
research was mainly done in the library.)

In my e-letter to you of the 13th, I failed to put in the dates.  My work in
Peru began in 1984.  I was part of a team of six Canadians contracted by the
Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA, our counterpart to your
USAID) to design and implement a Master’s degree program in forest sciences
in a national university near Lima (National Agrarian University, La
Molina).  Our program with rural schools in poor rural villages began in
1992.  I return to Peru every year (missed one when I went to Cuba to see my
old buddy Fidel).

One of my students, a professor at the same university, Manuel Rios, and I
had a custom of walking to his home near the university after classes,
sitting under a large pepper tree in his garden, sipping cold beer or pisco,
and chatting.  Our conversations were often punctuated by explosions and gun
fire, common background noise during the heat of the Shining Path
rebellion.  We ignored the noise.  One day we decided to stop talking about
trivia.  The first serious topic that came up was launched by the question
“Why are all of our grad students from cities and well-off families?”  My
friend opined that it was because teachers in poor rural villages were
poorly trained and poorly paid, their schools were ill-equipped, and parents
of the students saw no connection between what the students were studying in
books produced in Lima and real life in the country.  I then told Manuel
about a similar situation described by teacher Elliot Wigginton in his
series of books entitled Foxfire, set in a poor village in the Appalachians
(do you know his work?).  Manuel asked “Can we do that?”
>
Well, a phone call to my family, gathered at my parents’ home in California,
resulted in our establishment of an endowment that funds Dream Number Two.
First, Manuel and I traveled from one end of Peru to the other, and across
the width of Peru.  We wanted to start a demonstration program, hoping
others would copy us.  We wanted a school on the coastal desert, in the
Andes, and in the rain forest, the three main Peruvian ecosystems.

We interviewed teachers in about ten schools, with parents present, to plumb
their response to our idea.  (Note that we did not involve government.  We
decided that we should get the backing of parents first.  The government
would not overturn a program that had strong village backing.)

Initially, we chose two schools in the desert and one in the Andes, and
launched the program.  We met with teachers, students, and parents and
involved all in the choices of teaching programs.  Our bottom line was that
the program had to involve environmental conservation.  Interestingly,
parents and students in each of the schools chose the raising of sheep as
their program.  This involves conservation of grasslands, forests, and
water.  Parents pitched in and taught the students how to shear sheep.  The
students used the wool to make scarves, hats, and ponchos, dyed with colors
from native plants, which they sold to tourists.  The money was then used to
purchase books, blackboard paint, looms and other materials for use in the
program.  They read about conservation, wrote reports about their programs,
and calculated their budgets – reading, writing, and arithmetic.

Well, the program took off like wildfire!  Soon the government was knocking
at the door, offering help.  Fifty five other rural schools are now copying
our model, using funds from other donors.  We expanded our program to a
school to the rain forest, closing the circle.  Our fund gives a stipend to
a national coordinator (José del Giudice), and regional coordinators (Lucio
Delgado [coast], Elisa Garcia [Andes], and Aureliano Sairtupac [rain
forest]).  The fund also gives scholarships to the best three students in
each school, so the kids can go on to secondary school, college, and even
university, unheard of before the program. It is a truly Peruvian program,
run by Peruvians.  Though I visit the schools annually with the
coordinators, I do so only to show continued interest and support.  Each
school throws a big fiesta when I visit, with the costumed kids doing dances
and giving speeches, and the parents preparing pachamancas (barbeques) of
goat or sheep.  Of course the kids show off their sheep and how they are
managing pastures.

Hilah and three of our four children have stayed at some of the schools and
helped train teachers and give some classes.  Last year, I took our fourth
kid to Peru and he has become interested in the program.
Well, Bunny, I could ramble on for pages, but maybe you are already dozing.
This blurb should bring your friend Alex up to speed, however.  He can ask
questions if so moved.

‘Tis lunch time, so I should sign off.

Ciao, amigo,

Norman

Dear Alex,

Wow, what an inspirational, timely and practical letter.   Thank you
and bless the guy who invented email, or you’d be answerable for a
sizeable swathe of rain forest as the responses mount up.  That would
be irony! To refresh your memory, we had a brief exchange in 2008 when
I was working with Chico Mendes’s daughter Elenira on the
commemoration of her father’s life and work. Clearly Synchronicity’s
at play today, since I woke to find an email from her!

My immediate reaction to your letter was to gather up my fur hat and
snow boots en route to the airport. In lieu of that, here are my
answers to your questions.

MY ACTIVISM

I presume, like yours, that my DNA has shaped my place in the world.
Of Jacobite descent, my dad’s family features warrior chieftains and
the explorers John Cabot and Mungo Parks.  The relevance of this is
that we’ve seen both sides of the fence, at times conquering invaders
but also enduring exile and the false brand of traitor imposed by the
English crown. There’s a strong family tradition of what some might
consider imprudent behaviour in the pursuit of justice.  I call it
standing up for what’s right.

Examples of my activism include:

* Working with his family and others to commemorate the life of Chico
Mendes and continuing to work to preserve the Brazilian rain forest.

*Conceiving and presenting a radio show that features individuals who
make a difference in the world. These include Moazzam Begg (ex
Guantanamo Bay detainee and Director of Cage Prisoners), Ben Luce (ex
Los Alamos physicist and whistle blower), Linda Wilkinson (ex chairman
of Amnesty UK and gay rights activist) and from Schumacher College
Satish Kumar (Earth Pilgrim and Editor of Resurgence), the late
Professor Brian Goodwin (Scholar in Residence) and Stephan Harding
(Ecologist in Residence).

* For Britain’s Channel 5, I developed and executive produced Vision5,
a competition and TV series for short films on how to change the
world. In place of production funding, I acquired donations of time,
money and facilities from leading individuals and organisations from
the media and charitable sector.  Launched at Downing Street by the
Rt. Hon Gordon Brown, Vision5 was screened on British terrestrial
television and at international venues including the Edinburgh
Television Festival, the United Nations and MOMA, New York.

WHAT I CAN OFFER NOW

Right now I can offer radio shows as illustrated above.  My latest,
Earth Jurisprudence, is a two hour special with Liz Hosken, the
Director of the Gaia Foundation, a traditional doctor and a Limpopan
elder with tribal and contemporary music from South Africa.

Sixty minutes long, the shows would need editing to re-record intros
and remove the ads from when they were broadcast on Glastonbury Radio.

Not time but financial restraints dictate that I cannot jump on a
plane today. However I hold a European/British passport and speak
French making Montreal an easy call. Hopefully there will be
opportunities in the future to book that flight. I’d love to hear any
thoughts you might have on what I could do in Canada.

MORE ON MY SKILLS AND EXPERIENCE

Following on from what’s mentioned above, I have worked as a Producer
in film, TV and commercials with budgets up to $4,000.000 and crews as
large as 250, shooting around the world.  (I no longer work is
advertising as the dichotomy between that and my core beliefs became
untenable).

Other projects include developing talent and new ventures, co-founding
and publishing The Knowledge, Britain’s leading film production guide
and advising individuals and organisations including Britain’s Media
Trust on how to encourage volunteering.

Lastly I’m beginning to write again. For now it’s a blog about
personal and societal transformation.

TO FINISH

I am forwarding your piece to my friends and others, accompanied by
persuasion and occasional coercion to read and consider it properly.
In addition I’ll keep thinking about what else can be done and feed
that through as and when it comes to me. Ideas are bubbling already,
but I want to keep my first response reasonably concise.  I’m
currently in London and can be reached at the above email or on +44
7889 437192 if you’d like to make contact or want someone across the
pond to bounce ideas against.

Alex, thank you so much for this uber invitation to what may become
the ultimate party, a global shindig with cool music, laughter and fun
mixed in with our work on the serious stuff.  Since we need to unite
not divide, it will prove to be a very powerful tool to help change
the flow.

Unlike Canute, I think we may yet turn that tide for, as the Hopi say,
we are the ones we’ve been waiting for.

Wishing you all good things,

Rosie from London

Ecowarriors

We have an exciting new section, category and movement coming called Ecowarriors: Building the Movement.  Stay tuned for updates shortly!

we gotta buck the tide : a call to action

Yo musiclovers. I’m about to send out a mass
mailing call to action to those who care about the world. Modern
society is becoming increasingly sociopathic, no conscience about
anything any more, apathy, indifference, and ignorance are the order
of the day. We gotta buck the tide.

March, 2010: Dispatch #55: Sometimes You Gotta Buck The Tide: A Call to Action To All Who Care About the World.  Click here (Adobe PDF)