This week, I've come to Washington, D.C. from the Gulf Coast. Thirty-four days and 1,243 miles ago, I set off on foot from New Orleans, Louisiana. I've faced tornadoes, rainstorms, heat exhaustion, and countless blisters. But here I am, and I walked the whole way.

Why walk? Because it was clear that the reality of the BP disaster was not reaching our leaders in Washington, the mainstream media, or the rest of the country. So I decided to break this truth barrier in the simplest way I know how—by walking right through it and talking to average American citizens along the way.

BP has poured tens of millions of dollars into advertising to convince America that its oil disaster is cleaned up. President Obama and Congress have all but ignored the disaster since last summer. And the mainstream media have been sending the message, through its silence, that things are back to normal.

But things are far from normal on the Gulf Coast.

Today, most BP clean-up crews have been dismantled, yet new and weathered oil continues to show up on our beaches and in our marshes. Wildlife continues to wash up dead on our shores, by the hundreds.

The long-term impacts of the toxic cocktail of oil and dispersant (nearly 2 millions gallons of which were sprayed in the Gulf, the largest release ever) may not be known for years. Despite the unknowns about the future, we do know that coastal residents are facing an urgent, growing health crisis on the Gulf Coast.

Today thousands of people living on the Gulf Coast are experiencing headaches, respiratory afflictions, heart palpitations, liver and kidney damage and skin lesions—with limited or no access to appropriate health care. These symptoms go beyond those of the clean-up workers; anyone who breathes the air or eats the seafood may be affected.

Diary of a Disaster:
6 Months in the Gulf
What it’s like to respond to an environmental and democratic crisis—and where we go from here.

The economic devastation also continues. The claims czar appointed by President Obama, Kenneth Feinberg, has so far proved inadequate in providing fair settlements. The Gulf Coast is devastated by the lack of fishing opportunities and decreased tourism, and still reeling from the moratorium on oil drilling. Feinberg was appointed to relieve this economic pain, but instead was found by a Federal Judge to be beholden to BP. Coastal residents, backed into a corner by economic necessity, often accept unfair settlements, signing away their right to sue BP in the process. The option of eating today or dealing with twenty years of litigation is not a real option at all.

The long-term sustainability of the region's economy, environment, and health is very much in question. But Congress, the President, and the media have mostly turning a blind eye to the ongoing disaster.

Congress has yet to act to allocate funding to restore the Gulf Coast. Under the Clean Water Act, BP and other responsible parties will be required to pay fines for the damage they have caused to the environment. These fines, based on the number of barrels released, could reach up to $20 billion. But U.S. law does not specify that the penalty dollars have to be used in the Gulf. And the company's lawyers may try to reduce that amount to as little as $3 million. 

Congress must pass legislation that directs BP's fines and penalties specifically to Gulf Coast ecosystem restoration and community recovery, and the federal government must fight to ensure BP does not limit its liability. Without Congressional action, the Gulf and its people may never fully be restored.

A year ago, in the days before the disaster began, we thought that the laws regulating the oil industry and protecting public health were stringent and adequately enforced to prevent catastrophe. We were wrong. What has happened to the people and environment in the Gulf of Mexico is a human and civil rights violation. And it continues to be an environmental and humanitarian crisis.

The lack of governmental protection on behalf of the people is disheartening and destructive to the very fiber of our country's foundation. But if anything good has come out of the disaster, it is the growing activation of Gulf Coast residents. People like me who trusted in our government and democracy, but now see the true sway that corporations and the oil industry have. Rest assured, there is a movement growing on the Gulf Coast for clean air, clean water, health, justice, and democracy. But we can't do it alone.


Cherri Foytlin is the mother of six and the wife of an oil worker in Rayne, Louisiana. She co-founded Gulf Change, blogs for www.BridgeTheGulfProject.org, where this piece was originally posted, and walked to D.C. from New Orleans (1,243 miles) to call for action to stop the BP oil disaster. Bridge the Gulf is a citizen journalism project led by Gulf Coast activists and mediamakers working toward a just, healthy, sustainable future.

Interested?

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America awoke the morning of April 21 to learn that BP’s well, the Deepwater Horizon, had blown out in the Gulf of Mexico and was on fire. Eleven men were dead. BP began dumping dispersants (toxic chemicals that sink oil) into the Gulf and lies into the media.

I had left Alaska on February 10 for another round of national talks on the democracy crisis and how we can take back our government... from the corporations. My phone went berserk with media requests. Lisa Marie, my assistant and friend, asked when I was going down to the Gulf. “I’m not,” I said. She knew better.

For both of us, it was déjà vu. During the Exxon Valdez oil spill 21 years earlier in Alaska, Lisa Marie had worked with traumatized children and families. She worked for several years as a board member and volunteer for the Cordova Family Resource Center. With my doctorate in marine pollution, I became a spokesperson for the commercial fishing industry, testifying in the state legislature and Congress for stronger spill prevention measures and working to ban dispersants, and then starting the Copper River Watershed Project to help the community recover from long-term socioeconomic impacts. Lisa Marie knew I needed time to process my own memories that surged afresh with BP’s blowout, the inept government-industry response, and the lies.

It took me a week to come out of my foxhole. I thought about all the mistakes our community had made after the Exxon-Valdez spill, of all that we’d learned during our decades of fighting. All of the communities in the Gulf will make the same mistakes, I thought glumly... unless someone warns them. Suddenly I realized that someone was me.

On May 3, Lisa Marie and I flew to New Orleans. She had a return ticket; I did not. Before the flight, a black limousine took me to a studio in Denver for an interview with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now!; a black limousine picked us up in New Orleans for an interview with Anderson Cooper on AC 360. The pace didn’t slow down for five months.

From May through early October, I drove back and forth across the Gulf, giving community talks and workshops that evolved with the needs:

May

Shared Exxon Valdez stories and encouraged people to come up with a Plan B—how they could help themselves instead of waiting for BP or the federal government to make them whole as Exxon had promised, but failed, to do in Alaska.

In the town of Jean Lafitte, one Cajun fisherman stopped me mid-talk and begged, “Miss Riki, c-a-a-a-a-lm down!” A week later, my southern hosts had figured out how to “handle” me: “Miss Riki, she’s high-strung. You gotta sit ‘er down and feed ‘er!” That worked.

June

Encouraged people to take air and water quality samples to document the damage from the spill and the threat to human health (the federal agencies’ sampling programs found nothing to support the outbreak of respiratory illnesses and skin “rashes” that residents were experiencing). We amassed documentation of "disappeared" evidence.

A security guard in Florida hid behind bushes to take photos of BP-contracted Waste Management employees dumping wildlife carcasses in a dumpster. She sent the photos from her cell phone. “You can see the bush in the picture!” says Lisa Marie.

July

Encouraged people to take blood samples to link their illnesses with the high levels of oil and dispersants they were finding in their air and water. They tested outdoor swimming pools, rain, bayous, and beach sand.

Ordinary folks across the Gulf are turning to covert operations, grabbing cameras to document and report oil sightings and dispersant use in coastal seas. One grandmother tells me, “I’m too old for this!” But she keeps feeding me information.

August

Following massive use of oil dispersants in heavily populated coastal areas, dealt with extremely sick (and now dying) people. (The federal government and BP still deny this occurred, though federal investigators now have documentation. I believe the spraying was done to keep up appearances that the oil was "gone"—conveniently in time for mid-term elections.) Found medical doctors to properly diagnose and treat people as doctors in the Gulf were diagnosing anything but chemical illnesses. Encouraged those challenging re-opening of commercial fisheries, as they were still finding lots of evidence of oil and dispersants.

In Bayou La Batre, Alabama, two state officials tried to convince an audience of fishermen that it was okay to fish in coastal waters. Finally, one exasperated fellow boomed into the microphone, “I am a coon ass, not a dumb ass!”

September and October

Same as August.

In Louisiana, folks are calling the renamed Mineral Management Services, an agency captured by the oil industry it is charged with regulating, “Bummer”—for Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation, and Enforcement (BOEMRE). It fits. BP and the Coast Guard call the oil that still washes ashore “algae.” It’s not. The new joke in Louisiana is to go to BP stations and ask them to fill up and check the “algae.”

In mid-October, I resumed the national tour that was interrupted in April, finally finding my way home on December 6 after being gone for 290 days! Cordovans showered me with thank-yous, hugs, and “‘atta girls.” It felt great.

Now

Now I’m back in the Gulf. There’s a lot on my list, from continuing the work of banning dispersants to finding a university that will partner with community organizations to conduct a 20-year study on the health impacts of the spill on Gulf residents.

"Action is the Antidote to Despair"
Photo essay: A photographer confronts the BP oil disaster.

The story isn’t over. Indeed, this story has the potential to unite Americans in a serious commitment to transition off fossil fuels, starting with a permanent ban on deepwater offshore drilling. It’s also an opportunity to confront the dangerous expansion of corporate power—for the people I’ve met here, watching the government protect BP instead of them has been more instructive than anything I could tell them.

It’s not too late to make sure the outcome of this spill is not, as it was twenty years ago, a return to “oil business as usual.”

Click here to learn more about what you can do and get Gulf updates from Riki Ott.

Riki Ott, PhD, wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Riki has written two books on the Exxon Valdez oil spill's impacts on people, communities, and wildlife, including the recently released Not One Drop: Betrayal and Courage in the Wake of the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill. A marine toxicologist and former fisherma’am, she is a national spokesperson with Move To Amend, a grassroots campaign advocating constitutional amendments to restrict corporate power.

Interested?

• A Crisis of Democracy: Real Solutions to the BP Oil Spill
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• John Francis: Walking Away From Oil
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• Read more YES! Magazine articles about the BP oil disaster.

Twenty-one years after the Exxon Valdez, the company has only paid out a tenth of the initial assessment of punitive damages. Ott recognizes many of Exxon’s tactics in BP’s recent behavior: underestimating the size of the spill, downplaying and covering up damages, seeking to cap liability early on. She’s been on the ground in the Gulf since early summer, sharing her strategies for grassroots resistance and recovery. But the real crisis, she says, is bigger than this, or any, oil spill. It’s a crisis of democracy: Corporations have become so powerful that our political system isn’t able to rein them in enough to keep such disasters from happening or to hold them accountable when they do.

For Ott, the realization that corporate power was a fundamental threat came as she watched Exxon continue to profit while she and her neighbors lost their livelihoods, with few options for recourse. Now, in the Gulf, she’s seeing a similar awakening from residents working across political barriers to fight for justice from BP.

Ott believes this could be a breakthrough moment for reclaiming power from corporations. She spoke to YES! Magazine web editor Brooke Jarvis about the best strategies for using—and finally fixing—our democracy.

Brooke: Last week, BP announced that it will stop accepting new claims for damages; national newspapers are asking, “So where's the oil?" Is the disaster over?

Riki: [Laughs] Not if you look at my inbox! It all makes me wonder: Why this charade? Why this intense push to have it all be over? I think the closest analogy is when an insurance company wants to settle as quickly as possible after a car accident. They want to be able to say, "Sorry, you already signed this piece of paper, and we're not liable for that anymore." I think there's a lot of that going into BP's thinking right now. This toxic stew of oil and dispersants that got released into the Gulf is an experiment—it’s untested, so we don’t know yet how much damage it will cause. BP thinks if it settles now, it won’t have to pay for the destruction that becomes clear down the road.

The Exxon-Valdez showed us that oil spills do in fact cause long-term damage. The herring fishery in Prince William Sound is still closed—it's closed indefinitely until stocks recover, and we're talking 21 years now, not to mention a smaller amount of oil.

Brooke: In the Gulf, is anybody having a hard time seeing the oil, or its effects?

Riki: When the infamous pie chart came out, the media interpreted it to mean that 75 percent of the oil is gone. But “dispersed” oil is not disappeared oil—it may not be on the surface, but it’s in the water column, it’s lining the ocean floor, it’s in the food chain. If you add the parts of the pie that say “oil dispersed chemically” and “oil dispersed naturally” to the residual oil, the truth is that 75 percent of the oil is still there, just in a different form. Really, it’s convenient for BP that it’s not on the surface—and that may have played a role in the decision to use these toxic dispersants—because it makes it easier to pretend it’s gone.

That day, I was at a meeting in Gulfport, Miss., with about 100 fisherman from four different states. People’s phones were lighting up with stories coming in of boats and planes spraying dispersants at night, of people sprayed and exposed and sick—I mean, sick to the point of throwing up brown and peeing brown—and stories of fish kills and bivalve kills. To be in Gulfport Miss., at the moment when this disaster is declared over while fisherman from four different states are getting phone calls from back home saying, "Oh my God, oh my God”—it was an amazing juxtaposition. The reality of harm was still happening even as BP and the federal government started the game of "It's all over."

That was a horrible week. I was trying to get people to emergency rooms and to find doctors who would diagnose their symptoms properly. People are sick, and what I find totally inexcusable is pretending all these illnesses are really something other than they are. My God, I talked to boom workers who were diagnosed with food poisoning and heat stroke back in May, who are still sick with the exact same symptoms. Do food poisoning and heat stroke last for three months?

Photo by U.S. Coast Guard.

And then there was the announcement that the seafood was safe to eat. The fishermen would like nothing better than to be back out harvesting seafood that is safe to eat. But they're the ones who are out there, finding false bottoms on their depth sonars—the depth finder thinks the bottom is 12 feet down, but it’s really just a plume of oil and dispersants. They've been lowering absorbent pads in their pots, just to see what’s down there on the bottom. The pads come to the surface, dripping with oil—even though the surface is clean and sparkly blue. They say, "No, we don't want to fish in this. We don't think the seafood is safe."

Brooke: It must be infuriating to actually watch people turn away from you while there’s still so much suffering. What are people doing about it?

Riki: The bottom line is we’re still in the middle of a war here, trying to document as best we can this unfolding horror that’s being covered up. We’re trying to get people's spirits up, saying: "This is all part of the game, we've just got to take this to the next level now, keep hanging together, and exposing what’s happening. Get the photographs, get the stories, just keep documenting. There have been lies all summer. The only thing that has changed is the intensity ramped up. So, let's just keep out there.”

We’re putting a lot of our energy into community-based environmental studies. By that, I mean collecting data about air quality, water quality, public health, toxins in people’s blood. Many people don’t have confidence that their illnesses—the headaches, the sore throats, the blisters—are connected to the chemicals, simply because the federal agencies are telling them that there aren’t air or water quality issues. We’re doing sampling to prove that there are. We’re also trying to get a community health clinic set up in each of the affected states, and to help care providers recognize chemical illnesses.

Brooke: You wrote recently: "This contest is about far more than dollars or damages. It's about our country's ability to hold big, corporate criminals accountable to the public interest, and ensure that they follow the laws we enact." What does it mean to move beyond the immediate question of accountability for this one disaster to the bigger question of corporate accountability?

Riki: This BP disaster, like the Exxon-Valdez, is more than an environmental crisis—it's a democracy crisis. Right now we’re playing the game: going through regulatory arenas, tightening some laws. But that’s not good enough. The real question is, how do we get control of these big corporations?

It didn’t take long for people to start looking at this bigger issue, asking what we can do about corporations that are totally out of control. I would say, "Does anybody think the federal government is in charge?" And nobody would raise their hand. “OK, then who is?” I’d ask. “Is it ‘We the People,’ or ‘We the Corporation?’” Here, it is so clear that it’s the corporations. People are getting shoved off their beaches, told they can't have cameras, told they can't go near carcasses. It's like, "Wait! I thought this was America?"

Want to help support grassroots groups in the Gulf? Here are Riki's picks:

Louisiana Bayou Keeper
Hurricane Creek Keeper
Louisiana Bucket Brigade
Louisiana Env. Action Network
The Gulf Coast Fund

People are really connecting the dots about corporate power and the way this disaster’s been handled. First, there were the exemptions and the waivers that allowed BP to use improper equipment, which led to this oil spill. Then, it came out that BP wasn’t being honest about what, and how much, was really gushing out of that hole—they’d had high resolution images for a month that they’d never shared with the federal government. So people down here wondered, "Why is the industry that pays a penalty based on how much oil it spills left in charge of saying how much it spilled?" Then there’s the way they’ve kept the media—and ordinary people with cameras—away from the shorelines and the water and the carcasses. It’s a joke around here: People see the dead animals on the beach, or they see them collecting in ocean currents by the thousands, and they know they aren’t counted. People get threatened with arrest for even going near. The carcasses are not being kept for damage assessment, like they were after the Exxon-Valdez. Or when people report oil on the surface of the water, they’re not seeing it skimmed and collected; they’re coming back the next day and seeing these tell-tale bubbles where dispersant was sprayed.

People have started to ask, “How did BP get this much control? Why is the Coast Guard being used as a public shield—against us? Who’s in charge?”

Corporations have really learned to control these situations. They didn’t expect the environmental movement that resulted after the Santa Barbara blowout in 1969, which helped push legislation like the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, and National Environmental Policy Act. But since then they’ve learned how to manage the fallout better and better. Really, that’s the biggest difference I’ve seen between the Exxon-Valdez and the BP blowout: Corporations know how to intentionally operate to get control of the government, the people, and the media. They’ve been very successful at it, and it shows.

Brooke: But with the spill and its effects really highlighting the impact of unchecked corporate power, is there a possibility for a breakthrough moment, a real movement to control corporations?

Riki: I’ve noticed that when there’s a disaster like this, people all tend to band together in defense of their way of life. The political frames start to get kind of wobbly. Reality is changing so fast right in front of their noses, and the way they thought the world worked all of a sudden doesn’t. There’s an opportunity to penetrate the frames that are normally pretty hard and tight and fast, keeping us divided as red or blue, liberal or conservative.

For example, when I was in Fort Walton, Florida—and this is just one example—we drafted a petition to get the EPA the authority to delist products the public doesn’t like (right now products can’t be unapproved, and that’s made it hard to get traction on banning Corexit, the dispersant). Everyone was wildly enthusiastic, including some people who asked for an electronic version so they could share it with their network of 70 tea party groups throughout the state of Florida. I about fell over. And they’re surprised, too, to find how much we have in common—I’ve had people in audience after audience say, with shock, “Nothing you said offended me.” Then they’ve asked me to come and speak about the evolution of corporate personhood and the demise of democracy. Groups in Tallahassee, Fla., and Jackson, Miss., have said they’d like to join Move to Amend, a national coalition to amend the U.S. Constitution to affirm that only human beings have Constitutional rights and non-living entities—or as I tell fifth-graders, things without belly buttons—don’t.

Real People v. Corporate People
The fight is on.

I think this BP disaster has really pushed people’s tolerance for accepting the myth that we live in a functioning democracy—whether they’re red or blue of Tea Party or whatever. After Citizens United was decided, 80 percent of Americans across the political divide said that they don’t think corporations should have the rights that people do. But now it’s becoming painfully clear why that’s so important.

You know, it’s the socially vulnerable people who see the corporate threat first, because it affects them first—they know who the law protects, because it’s not them. The real change has been for the people who believed the government was going to take care of them, and that the laws were going to work to protect them. They’re now saying, literally, the same things we were saying in Cordova after the Exxon-Valdez: “I feel like a film has been pulled away from my eyes, and I see how the world really works.” I’m hearing those exact same words in the Gulf: “I feel like a veil has been pulled off my face.” People are now waking up, and they’re ready to put their shoulders to this wheel, to work to create a country that we thought we had.

Brooke: What does that mean, in the communities you’ve been in in the Gulf coast? What are people doing to create a different kind of country?

Riki: Well, many of them are joining the fight to curb corporate power. But it’s about more than theory and trying to pass a Constitutional amendment—it’s also about doing democracy in our own communities. Just doing it. Building the vision. I think enough of us realize where we need to go, and so it’s a matter of sitting down and figuring out, community by community, how we can be more self-reliant and more resilient. Starting Transition communities, getting our towns to sign the Kyoto Protocol, making our individual communities more self-reliant. Regional energy, regional food, local water. Growing gardens, strengthening neighborhoods, growing our businesses horizontally rather than vertically.

Let’s face it: Corporations are going to try to smash anything we build in the political arena. But if we do it in our communities, under their radar screen, we’re capable of so much. People always seem to think the change is outside of them. Really it’s about your own backyard. Democracy is messy, but it really does work when we all sit down and start listening to one another. And there’s no excuse for not doing it! We wanted a democracy by and for the people, and that means everybody has got to get out of their chairs and figure this out. Many hands make light work.

Brooke Jarvis interviewed Riki Ott for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Brooke is YES! Magazine’s web editor.

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As the Gulf Coast's seafood industry works to bolster public confidence in the safety of its product, fishermen from four Gulf states held a press conference over the weekend to voice concerns about what they consider to be the premature opening of commercial fishing grounds following the BP oil disaster.

The press conference took place Saturday afternoon in Ocean Springs, Miss. following a listening session with Ray Mabus, the federal official in charge of developing a long-term Gulf restoration plan.

"Gulf Coast fishermen do not want to sell tainted seafood but are being forced, by the premature opening of inland and gulf waters to commercial fishing, to choose between a clean gulf or their livelihood," according to a press release announcing the event. "Fishermen would rather work cleaning the severely damaged gulf than selling tainted seafood."

Among those involved in organizing the event were Chris Bryant, a commercial fisherman from Alabama; Louisiana Bayoukeeper Tracy Kuhns, whose husband is a commercial fisherman; and Thao Vu with the Mississippi office of Boat People SOS, which works with many Vietnamese-American fishermen.

The concerned fishermen are demanding that all dispersant use be stopped immediately and that all fishing re-openings be halted until seafood tissue sampling shows it to be safe. They also want local commercial fishermen to be given first shot at cleanup and recovery jobs.

A fishing boat for sale in Biloxi, Miss.

Photo by Kris Krüg.

Concerns over the safety of Gulf seafood deepened last week after crabbers in coastal Mississippi pulled up dozens of crabs with black-tainted gills—something they'd never seen before. Crabs are bottom feeders, so the presence of oil in their tissues suggests the pollution is now covering the sea floor.

But as previously closed fishing grounds re-open, federal officials are trying to convince the public that Gulf seafood is safe to eat. Walt Dickhoff, who oversees chemical testing for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Seattle seafood testing lab, told the New Orleans Times-Picayune that Gulf seafood is receiving unprecedented scrutiny and that he's "quite confident" it's safe to eat.

Meanwhile, Louisiana seafood promotion board chairman Harlon Pearce is heading up a delegation to Washington this week to tout the safety of his state's product. He has plans to make a 30-foot-long shrimp and oyster po' boy for federal officials, the Associated Press reports.

Sue Sturgis is editorial director of the Institute for Southern Studies and co-editor of the Institute's online magazine, Facing South.

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Calling fungi the "soil magicians," Paul Stamets believes it is mycelium that will provide the answers to our current ecological and health problems.

As humans we are more closely related to fungi than any other kingdom. By studying their properties we are able to find treatments for diseases as well as solutions to cleaning up our environmental crises, such as the recent oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

Video courtesy of TED.

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Carl Safina explores how the ocean is changing, and what those changes mean for wildlife and for people. In the 1990s he helped lead campaigns to ban high-seas driftnets, re-write US federal fisheries law, work toward international conservation of tunas, sharks and other fishes, and achieve passage of a UN global fisheries treaty.

The Gulf oil spill dwarfs comprehension, but we know this much: it's bad. In this video, Carl Safina scrapes out the facts in this blood-boiling cross-examination, arguing that the consequences will stretch far beyond the Gulf -- and many so-called solutions are making the situation worse.

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The annual TED conference held in Long Beach is a gathering of some of the world's most innovative thinkers who come to share and communicate their ideas. Videos of the speakers are available online at www.ted.com.

For more information about Carl Safina, visit his website.

Pete Seeger, activist and one of the greatest singer/songwriters of the last century, has spoken out through song against the BP oil spill. 

He performed his new protest song, "God's Countin' On Me, God's Countin' On You" with musician James Maddock in a concert benefiting the Gulf Restoration Network.

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I’ve had a hard time wrenching my eyes away from the Gulf since the Deepwater Horizon began spewing poison just over 100 days ago. Google Maps tells me that Grand Isle, Louisiana is 2,316 miles away from my office here in Oakland, CA and yet it feels like that oil is washing right up on my doorstep.

What makes the devastation in the Gulf feel so personal?

For me, it’s the stories of families that have lost everything, shrimpers and fisherman whose livelihoods may never recover. It’s the photos of oil-drenched pelicans, the same birds I remember seeing down in Florida as a kid. It’s watching our political system unable to muster the proper response to the crisis: a full out clean energy mobilization that could finally break our addiction to fossil fuels.

I’ve wanted to know what makes the Gulf disaster tear up our hearts because there are other environmental fights out there that need to feel just as personal.

For the last two months, I’ve been emailing and Skype-ing with Cynthia Ong, one of the leaders of Green SURF, a coalition of organizations in the Malaysian state of Sabah on the island of Borneo. Cynthia and her allies are working to stop a coal fired power plant that could have a devastating effect on the environment and community of the island.

The people of Borneo need the support of the international community to stop the plant. With most of the paperwork already approved and construction ready to begin this August, the Prime Minister of Malaysia, Najib Razak, is one of the few people left with enough power to still pull the plug.

If Najib feels enough international pressure, there’s a good chance he will scrap the plant. But without a global response, the project will undoubtedly move forward.

Borneo is over 8,000 miles away from Oakland, yet this coal plant needs to start feeling just as close as Grand Isle and the Gulf coast.

Because if we can’t stop a coal plant in a famous place like Borneo, how will we ever stop the hundreds more being planned for less iconic places across the planet? And how will we begin to take on the even more difficult problem of the climate crisis—which is already hammering vulnerable communities but still feels distant and invisible for many of us?

The Internet has provided us with a powerful tool in this struggle. Not so long ago, we’d be reaching for an encyclopedia to look up where exactly Borneo is. Now it’s just a click away.

Images of the pristine beaches that will be ravaged by the coal plant or video of the coastal communities that may be forced off their land can be beamed directly to our laptops. Studies about how Borneo could generate its electricity needs from clean and renewable sources are freely available.

Perhaps most importantly, though, politicians like Prime Minister Najib can hear our voices—even if they’re 8,000 miles away. Green SURF is encouraging people to write on Najib’s Facebook page or send him an online postcard expressing opposition to the plant.

The global response to the coal plant generated by Cynthia and many others (she’ll be the first to credit the incredible work of many activists and community groups on the ground) is already beginning to have an effect.

Time to Get Unreasonable
Shrimper Diane Wilson might be going to jail for her high-profile protests against BP.

Earlier this month, The Star, a leading English-language paper in Malaysia, ran a story about the global pressure building on Najib. Just last week, Roz Savage, international activist and distance rower, was in Borneo to shine a spotlight on the issue with some creative actions that got the attention of the press. And throughout the summer, Green SURF and their allies have worked to submit hundreds upon hundreds of public comments criticizing the Detailed Environmental Impact Assessment (DEIA) of the coal plant, a key hurdle it must clear in order to be built.

 They seem to have been heard: On July 29, Free Malaysia Today reported that the DEIA was “laced with fraud, incompetence or plain negligence.”

Now, it’s crucial to continue to build opposition to the plant. At this point, spreading the story, photos, and videos of what’s happening in Borneo is the most important step that citizens around the world can take. Petitions, like the one up now at Change.org, are also circulating. Joining the SOS Borneo Facebook group can help you stay up to date with the latest developments.

Personally, I look forward to the day when we can look up and see solutions instead of disasters, whether they’re just around the corner or halfway around the world (showing those solutions is one of the goals of 350.org’s 10/10/10 Global Work Party this October).

For now, though, it’s important to look directly at the challenges we face, take a deep breath, and try once again to make a difference. 

Jamie Henn wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Jamie is a co-coordinator of 350.org. In 2007, he co-organized Step It Up, a campaign that pulled together over 2,000 climate rallies across the United States to push for strong climate action at the federal level.

Interested?

• The BP Oil Spill: Ideas and actions for responding to the Gulf disaster.

• Bonn Climate Talks, Beyond BP: We must keep up pressure for a fair, ambitious climate treaty.
• 2010 a Tipping Point for Renewable Energy: 100 days into the BP disaster, it's time to quit claiming that an economy based on fossil fuels is our only option.
  

It’s been a tough summer for the oil industry—or so you’d think.

BP’s geyser of oil has now made headlines for 100 days, each one a reminder that oil extraction poses dangers we can’t control.

Even with the temporary cap on the well providing a respite from new oil, there’s been little time for the industry to breathe a sigh of relief, much less burnish its image: A second well, even closer to shore, ruptured after being struck by a barge and began spilling more oil into the Gulf. In Michigan, 800,000 gallons of oil poured into the Kalamazoo River from a broken pipeline. In China, an explosion at an oil terminal caused a massive fire that took 15 hours and 2,000 firefighters to extinguish, as well as a nearly 300-mile large spill of thick crude oil, one of the worst in that country’s history.

And in the Arctic, May and June broke records for the fastest ice melt of any summer since recording began.

But even with the dangers of oil so clearly and horrifyingly illustrated, this summer is unlikely to end with any major constraints on the oil industry in the U.S.—the main responses will likely be a temporary moratorium on new offshore wells (not offshore drilling itself) and a stripped-down energy bill that tries to hold BP accountable for the costs of its spill.

Why? Why can't we muster the political will for a real response—one that would help us avoid future disasters by breaking our dependence on fossil fuels? Because of the belief, strongly held even in the midst of our shock and outrage, that there is no alternative to our current oil-based society, dangerous though we must all now recognize it to be.

But the truth is that there not only is an alternative to oil dependence, it’s already being built.

A new UN-backed study of renewable energy worldwide declared that the world has reached a “clear tipping point” for green power. In Europe and the U.S., renewable energy grew faster than fossil fuel energy in 2009—for the second year in a row.  Sixty percent of new electricity generation in Europe and more than half of new energy in the U.S. came from renewable sources. China built more than 37 gigawatts of renewable power generation capacity, more than any other country.

“If this trend continues,” the report notes, “then 2010 or 2011 could be the first year that new capacity added in low-carbon power exceeds that in fossil-fuel stations" on a global basis.

The report also found that more than 100 countries, half of them in the developing world, now have policies to promote renewable energy.

Achim Steiner, the UN’s undersecretary general, noted that there is “a serious gap between the ambition and the science in terms of where the world needs to be in 2020 to avoid dangerous climate change. But [this research shows that] this gap is not unbridgeable."

"Indeed," he said, "renewable energy is consistently and persistently bucking the trends and can play its part in realizing a low carbon, resource efficient Green Economy if government policy sends ever harder market signals to investors.”

That’s a big "if," considering the failure of the U.S. Congress to turn this summer’s oil disasters into strong climate legislation. But at least now, neither industry nor government can continue to claim that an economy based on fossil fuels is our only option. 

Brooke Jarvis wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Brooke is YES! Magazine's web editor.

• Read more YES! articles about the BP oil spill.
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• BP Oil Spill: Time to Get Unreasonable
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• 13 Best Energy Ideas (Plus a Few Duds)
  

Arriving in Louisiana, the delegates prepare to speak of their experiences with their own oil crisis. To view the video documenting the first day of their visit to the Gulf, see the link below, or click here.

Photo by Amazon Watch.

From 1964 until it pulled out in 1992, Texaco—which merged with Chevron a decade ago—dumped some 17 million gallons of crude oil and 20 billion gallons of drilling waste water into waterways and pits in the Ecuadorian Amazon. The contamination has seeped into water supplies, where it's killed fish and is blamed for health problems among local residents, who suffer from elevated rates of cancers, reproductive disorders, and respiratory ailments.

At a town hall meeting that took place July 1, in Dulac, La., the delegation discussed a report about their experiences back home. Titled "The Lasting Stain of Oil: Cautionary Tales and Lessons From the Amazon," it offers advice for holding polluters accountable and planning for long-term recovery after severe environmental contamination.

"Although BP says that it plans to take full responsibility for the damages caused by its spill and restore the Gulf Coast to the way it was before, the experience in Ecuador shows that oil companies do the right thing only when compelled to do so by a combination of political, financial, media, and community pressure," says the report, which was prepared by the Asamblea de Afectados por Texaco (Assembly of Those Affected by Texaco), along with Rainforest Action Network and Amazon Watch.

Climate Heroes
Clayton Thomas-Müller and the Indigenous Environmental Network: working to keep oil companies out of Alberta's tar sands.

Among the members of the visiting delegation is Luis Yanza, a 2008 winner of the prestigious Goldman Prize for his efforts to help 30,000 people affected by Texaco/Chevron's contamination file a class-action lawsuit against the oil giant. He will share his ideas about how Gulf Coast residents can pressure an oil company to take responsibility for the damage it caused.

The other Ecuadorean delegates are Emergildo Criollo, a leader of the Cofan tribe who traveled to the U.S. earlier this year to present Chevron's CEO with 350,000 letters from people around the world demanding clean-up and compensation for affected communities; Humberto Piaguaje, a representative of the Secoya, one of six indigenous tribes in the rainforest region devastated by oil drilling; and Mariana Jimenez, a grandmother whose home is surrounded by oil contamination and whose husband—a Texaco employee—died of cancer.

Besides the Houma, whose traditional fishing culture and economy are being devastated by the oil spill, the delegation has also visited with the Atakapa-Ishak tribe in Louisiana's Grand Bayou Village. The culture of the Atakapa-Ishak people is so tied to the water and fishing that their oral history says they came from the sea.

While it may still be too soon to draw firm conclusions about the BP oil spill's environmental health effects on Gulf Coast residents, the spilled oil and contaminants are known to contain chemicals harmful to human health. Louisiana has reported at least 143 illnesses related to exposure to pollution from the oil spill—108 in cleanup workers and 35 in the population at large.

And toxic contamination is not the only damage the Houma and Louisiana's other coastal residents have suffered at the hands of oil companies: The industry is responsible for as much as half of the severe coastal erosion problem facing Louisiana, which loses a chunk of land as big as a football field to the sea every 15 minutes.

Because of that accelerating land loss, the bayous of southern Louisiana where the Houma and other indigenous people have long lived are disappearing, with high tides now bringing seawater into yards and families forced to flee north whenever a tropical storm approaches.

The flooding in the region has gotten so severe that the neighboring Biloxi-Chitimacha tribe recently announced they would abandon their ancestral homeland to escape inundation.

But United Houma Nation Chief Michael Dardar says that's not an option for him, even in the wake of BP's disaster.

"People say just leave," Dardar told a community meeting last week in Dulac. "Ain't gonna happen, unless you take me out in a box."

Sue Sturgis is editorial director of the Institute for Southern Studies and co-editor of the Institute's online magazine, Facing South, where this article first appeared.

Interested?

• Amazon Tribes Win Against Big Oil
  In the Amazon rainforests of Peru and Ecuador, indigenous groups are on the front lines of the climate change battle.
  
• "Action is the Antidote to Despair"
  Photographer Kris Krug confronts the BP oil spill.
• John Francis: Walking Away From Oil
  When an oil spill coated birds in San Francisco Bay 40 years ago, he quit driving. Then he quit speaking. Madeline Ostrander asked him what he learned in that process that can help us deal with the BP oil spill.

Photos and audio by Kris Krug.

Eleven weeks into the oil disaster that is devastating the Gulf Coast, hope can be hard to find. For photographer Kris Krug, capturing the horrifying impact of our dependence on oil is "my chance to take a little bit of my power back." To those who feel emotionally overwhelmed by the disaster, Krug advises: "Do something. Action is the antidote to that despair you're feeling."

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• What Are People Doing About the Gulf Disaster?
  A response by YES! executive editor, Sarah van Gelder.
• John Francis: Walking Away From Oil
  When an oil spill coated birds in San Francisco Bay 40 years ago, he quit driving. Then he quit speaking. Madeline Ostrander asked him what he learned in that process that can help us deal with the BP oil spill.
• Bearing Witness: Chris Jordan on Art, Grief, and Transformation
  Photographer Chris Jordan's latest project left him feeling grief and hopelessness. Now he wants more people to discover how productive those emotions can be.

Catastrophes like the spill in the Gulf expose the destructive side of industries and their environmental impacts. They also create unexpected heroes, ordinary people like Lois Gibbs, propelled into the political arena when industrial waste exposed her community in Love Canal, New York, to cancer-causing chemicals. Three decades after her story forced America to grapple with industries’ toxic legacy, the tar balls that are washing onto Florida’s beaches are galvanizing a new movement, started by Dave Rauschkolb, a surfer and pizza bar owner.

Rauschkolb is not a professional Sierra-Club type and seems offended when asked about his political affiliation. But his business depends on tourism, and he’s incensed that state and federal politicians let the oil industry take a gamble on the safety of drilling in the Gulf Coast. “I am very angry that our predictions to Florida’s legislators that this type of accident could happen fell on deaf ears,” Rauschkolb wrote in a recent op-ed. “We have been telling them for months of our serious concerns.”

His anger has turned him into an activist. Rauschkolb created “Hands Across the Sand,” a series of demonstrations on Saturday, June 26, that call for an end to offshore oil drilling. The events are simple: Show up at 11 A.M. at your local waterfront, and join hands at noon. Demonstrations are happening in all 50 states and more than 30 countries.

Rauschkolb got the idea for Hands last fall when he heard about a bill in the Florida legislature that would have brought offshore drilling within 10 miles of his beloved beaches. He decided to organize what he expected would be a modest local demonstration on the beach, but his message struck a nerve among Floridians. The protest mushroomed into a 10,000-person event on dozens of beaches across the state. Rauschkolb believes that the response helped kill the bill in committee before it reached the floor of the Florida senate.

Now he hopes that news of the BP spill will mobilize enough Americans to force sweeping change—not just a tough response to BP but a transformation of U.S. energy policies.

I called Rauschkolb in Florida to find out what he expected Hands to accomplish.

Madeline Ostrander: How large do you hope Hands Across the Sand will be?

Dave Rauschkolb: We think it's going to be the largest anti-offshore oil drilling gathering of people in the history of the world. We're getting new sign-ups every day. When we held the demonstration in Florida in February, we estimated that 10,000 to 12,000 people participated. We organized 80 beaches. We had events from Jacksonville to Miami and from Key West all the way to Pensacola.

Madeline: What outcome are you hoping for?

Dave: For starters, a permanent ban on offshore drilling.

And I think it's time to make a major change. This is an opportunity for a paradigm shift. My greatest hope is that America’s response to the Deepwater Horizon incident will steer us away from our dependence on oil.

This is an opportunity for Americans to get it into their consciousness: Oil companies have been poisoning our energy policy and our political process with money and influence for far too long. The oil industry is calling the shots here, and it's time for Americans to take charge of their own energy future instead of allowing the oil companies to continue to dictate what kind of fuels we use.

President Obama is speaking the right language, but I'm concerned that the federal government is going to make BP the scapegoat, change some of the regulations and the safety issues, and give everyone the illusion that we’ve put the problem behind us. I believe far too much focus is being placed on BP. BP is definitely at fault and should be held accountable. But this should be an indictment on the entire offshore oil-drilling industry.

Any company could have done this. As recently as 10 months ago, off of Australia in the Timor Sea, a deepwater rig had a blowout and a subsequent fire. It took them three months to cap that leak by drilling a relief well. It didn't get a lot of press, and no one was really paying attention.

But excuse me, this has happened twice in the last year! And that was an entirely different company. It's obvious that the oil companies don’t have measures and technology in place to handle these situations. And it's just beyond me that we would consider allowing them to continue. We have oil on our faces now. Shame on any politician who is advocating expanded offshore oil drilling.

No one industry should be allowed to make mistakes that put so many people's lives and livelihoods at risk. The only way that we're going to get off our dependence on oil is to change our energy policies so that renewable energy industries can flourish. These are industries that will add a tremendous number of jobs to America's economy and won’t endanger our coastal economies, our wildlife, and our marine environments—or our air quality or atmosphere.

Madeline: When did you first become so passionate in your opposition to offshore drilling and to oil?

Dave: In October of 2009, I held a meet-and-greet on the beach at my restaurant in Seaside for David Pleat, who’s running for the state house of representatives in District 7. He gave an impassioned speech about his opposition to a bill in the state legislature that would lift the ban on nearshore oil drilling in Florida and allow drilling between three and ten miles of our beaches.

Right before he gave the speech, I was in a conversation, and I had said the words, "We need to draw a line in the sand about this and do what we can to stop it."

I'm sitting there next to my wife, and I got a flash of an idea: How great would it be for Floridians to join hands on the beaches and literally form that line in the sand? So I made a short speech challenging the people gathered there to do that.

I wrote up a mission statement the next day, and I got some friends of mine to create a website. Within about three months I was able to build support among environmental groups, including the Surfrider Foundation, Sierra Club, Audubon Society, Emerald Coastkeeper, and many more. And in Florida I was able to get the support of every Chamber of Commerce from Pensacola to Panama City.

Madeline: How did policymakers respond to the demonstration in February?

Dave: I definitely feel that we played a role in getting that bill tabled for the year. And we definitely made more Floridians aware of the issue of nearshore drilling.

Now, Florida’s governor, Charlie Crist, has made an announcement that he is going to try to call a special session [to take up an amendment to the state constitution]. If the amendment passed, it would give Floridians the chance in November to vote on a permanent ban on nearshore oil drilling in Florida. I applaud Governor Crist's conviction with this situation because, to me, anything that takes the issue out of the hands of the politicians and puts this decision into the hands of Floridians is a good thing.

Madeline: Were you involved in environmental issues before you organized these demonstrations?

Dave: No. I’ve never labeled myself as an activist. I'm pretty much a restaurateur. And I've been a surfer for 33 years. I've spent a lot of time in the Gulf of Mexico. I’ve witnessed every single hurricane. And I've lived in Florida for most of my life.

I'm passionate about protecting the Gulf of Mexico and Florida. I'm passionate about my community on many levels. I live in a wonderful place—North Florida is just an amazing place to make your life. And again, I'm only one person. All of the people who live and own businesses here are going to have to make a decision based on how that oil impacts us. This oil spill may scatter entire communities to the wind, much like Katrina did.

Madeline: Do you consider yourself a Democrat, Republican, or independent?

Dave: I don't think it matters whether I'm a Democrat or a Republican or independent in this context. I'm an American. And I care deeply about my home, our future, and about preserving the coastline and beautiful Gulf of Mexico for my seven-month-old daughter. And I think I represent a lot of Americans who feel the same way.

This has nothing to do with politics. This is about the protection of our coastal economies. I'm just one person. I've got three restaurants and 150 employees. And as this oil hits my beaches, if we don't have a full business season, I very well might have to put 150 people out of work. And I'm only one of thousands of people who are threatened by this in three coastal states.

It's time that Americans stop thinking like Democrats and Republicans. The news media have got us all bickering at each other. We need to be focused on the industries that are stifling our economic recovery. I'm finding through this national campaign that there are a lot of people who agree with me. And I talk to people all across the nation every single night, when they call me or they email me.

I think that this event resonates for people because it is something that we all agree on. We need more things in this country that don't divide us. We need more things that bring us together and make us proud to be Americans. It's my hope that this event may be one thing that can help Americans find common ground—so that we can stop beating each other up in conversations.

I just hope that our politicians will listen.

Madeline: Does the response to Hands Across the Sand make you feel hopeful?

Dave: Oh I'm very hopeful. I truly am. People from Hawai`i to Maine are going to be joining in, along with people from Japan; Majorca, Spain; and Tanzania. And hopefully, our politicians will begin to join hands as well and understand that renewable energy is where we need to go.

Madeline Ostrander interviewed Dave Rauschkolb for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Madeline is senior editor for YES! Magazine.

Interested? 

• John Francis—Walking Away From Oil: When an oil spill coated birds in San Francisco Bay 40 years ago, he quit driving. Then he quit speaking. We asked him what he learned in that process that can help us deal with the BP oil spill.
• What Are People Doing About the Gulf Disaster : In the past weeks, anger at the BP oil disaster has turned into action.

As oil continues to spew into the Gulf and Senate Democrats contemplate sweeping energy and climate legislation, it would be easy for the growing U.S. climate movement to focus exclusively on domestic challenges. But the universal challenge of climate change demands that we also think globally.

Last week, against the news backdrop of oil-covered pelicans and bumbling oil company executives, negotiators concluded the first round of post-Copenhagen climate talks. The meetings, which took place in Bonn, Germany, were a potent reminder that ending our fossil fuel addiction will require more than a slap on the wrist for BP, or even strong U.S. climate legislation. It will take a fair, ambitious, and binding international climate treaty that meets the latest science.

After all, environmental disasters are not exclusive property of the United States. Indeed, the worst impacts of our fossil fuel addiction are often reserved for poorer, more vulnerable communities around the world, communities that often bear all the costs and receive few of the benefits associated with “cheap,” dirty energy.

There’s broad agreement that fishermen in the Gulf deserve compensation for the loss of their livelihoods. But what does the U.S. owe to families in Nigeria, our fifth largest source of crude oil, whose lives have been wrecked by repeated spills and oil company abuses?

What is our responsibility to island nations and other vulnerable communities who bear the cost when oil is burned, converting it to heat-trapping carbon dioxide that threatens their survival?

As Bill McKibben recently reflected, “Dirty as the water is off the Mississippi Delta, that’s barely the tip of the damage from fossil fuel. If that oil had traveled down a pipeline to a refinery and then into the fuel tank of a car, it would have wrecked the planet just as powerfully.”

The Gulf oil disaster featured prominently in discussions at the U.N. Climate Meeting in Bonn, but the awareness doesn't go both ways: It’s clear that without a public outcry, the need for an international climate treaty won’t be on the mind of many Senators as they posture as anti-BP crusaders.

In fact, the latest reading of the Senate tea leaves is that Democrats are looking to drop the climate issue entirely. They’d rather settle for an energy bill now and save the more contentious issue of a cap on carbon for after the mid-term elections.

Delay may seem like an attractive alternative for nervous senators, but it’s not an option for many people around the world.

At the climate meetings in Bonn last week, island nations reiterated the need for immediate action to limit warming to below 1.5 degrees Celsius, rather than the old 2 degree benchmark adopted at Copenhagen.

“We are convinced that sooner or later the whole world will be talking about 1.5—or less—the way things are going,” said Ambassador Ronald Jumeau from the Seychelles Islands in a press conference in Bonn. “But by the time that arrives, some of our countries may longer exist. They will be beneath the waves.”

He continued, “While the Copenhagen Accord talks about looking at a 1.5 C target a couple years down the road, our argument has been we can’t afford to wait that long. The small island states do not have the luxury of time.”

For concerned citizens and activists in the United States, our task then is two-fold.

First, continue to build the public outcry over the BP disaster and push for strong domestic action that breaks the U.S. oil addiction.

Second, work to make the connection between the oil spewing into the Gulf and the carbon spewing into our atmosphere, and push the U.S. to support a strong international climate treaty.

At 350.org, we’re working with hundreds of partners to try and accomplish these goals. In the US, we’re helping coordinate the Hands Across the Sand day of action, when thousands of citizens will join hands on our nation’s beaches to protest future oil spills. Internationally, we’re coordinating a Global Work Party on 10/10/10, when thousands of communities around the world will get to work on climate solutions and demand our political leaders do the same.

Personally, I’m still haunted by what Ambassador Antonio Lima, vice-president of the Association of Small Island States, said to me at the climate talks in Bonn, “When I look at those birds covered in oil on the beaches in the U.S., I think of my children in Cape Verde. They’re lives are also threatened by our addiction to oil. They too may die on our beaches.”

That story hasn’t been written yet. If there’s a silver lining to the tragedy in the Gulf it will be found in our ability to finally build a movement strong enough to break our addiction to fossil fuels and create a more sustainable future. Not only here in the U.S., but around the world.

Jamie Henn wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Jamie is a co-coordinator of 350.org. In 2007, he co-organized Step It Up, a campaign that pulled together over 2,000 climate rallies across the United States to push for strong climate action at the federal level.

Interested?

• Standing Up to the Spill
  Anger at the BP oil disaster has turned into action.
• John Francis: Walking Away from Oil
  When an oil spill coated birds in San Francisco Bay 40 years ago, he quit driving. Then he quit speaking. Madeline Ostrander asked him what he learned in that process that can help us deal with the BP oil spill.
• Act Up. Act Now.
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It turns out that attempts by conservatives to discredit climate science may not have left a big dent on American public opinion after all. According to polls released this week, the vast majority of the public is still concerned about climate change, and, in the wake of the BP spill, readier than ever to ambitiously develop renewable energy.

A survey by Yale University shows that 61 percent of Americans believe global warming is real, a four-point rise since the same question was polled in January 2010. Fifty percent believe it is caused, at least in part, by human activities, a three-point increase. A Stanford University survey obtained even stronger responses—about three-quarters of those polled said they believe climate change is real and humans are wholly or partly to blame.

This is good news for anyone who was disheartened by a Pew survey last fall that suggested public concern over global warming had dropped—for instance, 65 percent believed it was a serious problem; down from 73 percent in spring 2008. Stanford professor Jon Krosnick, quoted in USA Today, says, “Several national surveys released during the last eight months have been interpreted as showing that fewer and fewer Americans believe that climate change is real, human-caused, and threatening to people … But our new survey shows just the opposite."

To me, the news is also a reminder of the highly variable nature of polls. Polls sometimes have significant margins of error. They are useful snapshots of the American psyche at a given moment, but I often wonder at the press when it claims to reach some startling conclusion about what Americans must think based on their responses to a rapid-fire and sometimes unwelcome phone call from a research institution.

Whether public concern has gone up or down by a small margin seems to me like a red herring. When half to three-quarters of Americans can acknowledge that climate change is a problem, it’s certainly no fringe issue. And a majority of the public supports action: For instance, the Stanford poll reveals that 84 percent of Americans favor tax breaks to encourage companies to produce more power from solar, wind, and hydro. As Obama considers whose ass to kick over the Gulf spill, I wonder how much more of a mandate he needs to pursue a climate bill and an ambitious energy policy.

Of course, the politics of the Senate are not, unfortunately, driven by majority public opinion. All the more reason why, as our executive editor, Sarah van Gelder, writes, we need people power to make Obama take action.

Madeline Ostrander is YES! Magazine's senior editor.

Interested?

What Are People Doing about the Gulf Oil Spill?
In the last week, anger at the BP oil disaster has turned into action.

John Francis Walks Away from Oil
When an oil spill coated birds in San Francisco Bay 40 years ago, he quit driving. Then he quit speaking. Madeline Ostrander asked him what he learned in that process that can help us deal with the BP oil spill.

I would like to believe that I am free. I would like to believe that I am awake and aware. And I would like to believe that I am generally a loving and compassionate person.
I would like to be free, yet I realize again and again that I am not. I am open to manipulation and control when I least suspect it. In a flash, I am not a loving and compassionate person at all.

Take the Gulf oil spill (spill? It’s more like a geyser, a gusher) or the recent Israeli military action against a blockade-busting flotilla of humanitarian supplies aimed for Gaza. Neither event is just news—they are direct calls to take sides. And, for those of us who find our side quickly, we are pretty sure that our side is clearly the right side. The others—they are criminal, if not in intent, then certainly in action.

Sometimes I just want to blast the stupidity of Israel's policies toward Palestinians, the horror of the occupation, and the marginalization of its Arab citizens. Sometimes I just want to vent my fury at the Big Oil for catastrophes of climate that so many have seen coming well before the current crisis. But I know that such blasting and such venting will only add to the difficulties and inhibit the healing that needs to be.

This is where I strongly suspect I relinquish not only my freedom but a good share of my awareness. In the virtual clarity of my response, I hardly realize that I have surrendered myself for manipulation by media and by my own preconceptions. Obviously, the big oil company and the occupying Israeli presence are at fault. The powerful, in their unending lust for more power, have once again created great suffering for the innocent and for the environment (also, of course, innocent).

These are terrible events—but how shall our righteous indignation solve anything? When we divide folks into the Good Guys and the Bad Guys (and how fortunate it is that we are always with the Good Guys!), we save ourselves from confronting the deeper ambiguities of life, and we distance ourselves from our own culpabilities and our own responsibilities.

People gathered to protest the BP oil company in Bloomington, Minnesota.

Photo by Fibonacci Blue

Suspecting that I have fallen prey to media and to preconception, I sometimes remember to take a few conscious breaths and invite an awareness beyond the headlines and the hype. The population of Gaza has been suffering under a blockade enforced by both Egypt and Israel that, while attempting to prevent weapons buildup, has prevented the delivery of needed medical and humanitarian supplies and building materials. The recent flotilla attempting to break that blockade was violently stopped. Along with so many others, I felt outrage at the Israeli response. But then I noticed, for example, that the violence met by the flotilla has incited world anger against a country that many believe should not even exist. There are those who suggest that inciting this anger was the deeper purpose of the flotilla. And what other country do people think doesn’t even have a right to exist?

What kind of consciousness would such thinking motivate in such a country? Could it motivate more violent responses than others can understand? Could it support unconsciousness about the suffering of the other? How can we step into the experience of the other and learn that true dialogue is possible only when blame is shared.

And I notice the silence in this country of all those whose voices have been demanding an increase in off-shore drilling, as well as a silence from other oil companies who are probably thanking their lucky stars that the geyser is not theirs. But where are the scientists of the other companies? Are they really willing to sit back and simply witness this environmental destruction?

And what about all of us and our addiction to oil? Even most of us who have been opposed to war have been quite happy to find gasoline prices lowering so we can more comfortably get on the road again.

Everyone Did It
And so I wonder whether real solutions, real healing, is once again frustrated by our own anger, our finger-pointing, and our self-righteous indignation. There is a tag-line that I’ve been noticing at the bottom of some emails lately, where many of us put quotes that matter to us. This particular quote is from Lao Tzu, and reads: “In the end, everyone will know that everyone did it.”

It is a basic truth that when a relationship works or when it fails, both parties always share responsibility. While this insight might inhibit our perception that the Other is to blame and we are clearly in the right, the abdication of responsibility actually is a denial of our freedom. If it’s all the Other’s fault, then war is inevitable, and no one really ever wins at war. Accepting our shared culpability and responsibility allows us to enter into a greater dialogue—learning to collaborate on the path to greater healing.

This is a time of emergency. We need to meet it with great compassion for our shared culpability and with great creativity and hopefulness for our healing. We need to seriously but gently assess our addictions. What are the changes we would have to make in our lives that would reflect a healing from our addiction to oil? How would we respond to crisis situations in the world if we were no longer addicted to war? We all need to take a few breaths when we catch ourselves in the Blame Game and enter together into the Same Game. Because whatever the end is, we shall all have contributed to it.

Rabbi Ted Falcon, Ph.D., wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Rabbi Falcon has taught Jewish traditions of Kabbalah, meditation, and spirituality for over thirty-five years. He is the author of A Journey of Awakening: Kabbalistic Meditations on the Tree of Life and co-author, with David Blatner, of Judaism For Dummies.

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