On Friday, September 2, 2011, as I stood with 160 or more climate activists in front of the White House, I was arrested, handcuffed and placed in a police van with twelve other activists. The people waiting for their turn to be cuffed clapped and cheered as each of us was led from our place in front of the White House to an area where we were frisked and photographed. Supporters in Lafayette Park across Pennsylvania Avenue from us chimed in, "Thank you. Stop the pipeline." We received training in peaceful civil disobedience from The Ruckus Society the evening before at a DC church. Our trainers were professionals and I learned more than I ever dreamed I would about civil disobedience. I had always thought my reading of Thoreau's Civil Disobedience made me an expert in the area. The training kept us from performing inadvertent actions that could have detracted from our mission. We had a great vegan meal and some of us slept in the church over night.
As was anticipated I was placed in a police van. What happened next was mind blowing. I was with twelve other men, six on each side of a separating partition. We had a chance to share. Jim Driscoll, the executive director of The National Institute for Peer Support, was seated next to me. He guided us into what turned out to be an hour-long climate activists' support group right in the police van. We each shared about ourselves and why we had come to DC to risk arrest. At one point when Jim was sharing, he broke into deep sobs as he visualized the world as it will be if we are unable to turn the tide on global warming. He reminded me of "The Weeping Prophet" from the Bible, who being able to peer into the future, experienced the pain and sorrow of what was to come. I think Jim could see that we could fail. Two-hundred species a day are being lost in what is now being described as the "holocene extinction." We are actually forcing the earth into a new geological epoch. I contributed the quote that I had always attributed to the Marxists, "Try again. Fail again. Fail better." As it turns out, seated on my other side was a former editor of Nation Books, who now has his own publishing firm. He corrected my Marxist attribution by informing us that it was actually Samuel Becket who wrote that. I had no idea you could learn so much in a police van.
Why in the world, you may ask, would a retired senior citizen living in Mt. Shasta, a place where heaven meets earth, deliberately take part in civil disobedience that would surely provoke arrest? Actually, there were many people of all ages from the fifty states and Canada at the White House to urge President Obama to stand up to big oil, to stop the Keystone XL Pipe Line and thus stave off an environmental disaster of mammoth proportions. That was reason enough reason for me. My personal call came as a result of listening to daily reports from Democracy Now regarding the Tar Sands Action. I remember the exact moment that I knew I couldn't stand it any longer. My partner John and I were hiking with our Irish Wolf Hound, Patrick. It just suddenly dawned on me. I told John, "I have to be there." He told me, "Go. You need to be there."
As it turns out, I was just one of 1,253 activists who were arrested in Washington DC in the Tar Sands action from August 20th to September 3rd in the largest ever instance of climate related civil disobedience in the US. The White House action was chosen as President Obama on his own can stop the Keystone XL pipeline without Congress. The pipe line would cross international boundaries. Therefore it falls under the aegis of the US State Department. Why is it so vital for us to stop the pipe line? First off, the XL Pipe Line, if built, would extend 1,700 miles through the middle of our country. It would carry tar sands oil from Alberta, Canada across some of our most important water aquifers, the sources of water for agriculture and drinking for millions of Americans, to Gulf Coast refineries in Texas. There will be spills: There is no question about that given the history of these pipelines. But there is more. This filthy tar sands oil is being off-loaded in the United States by TransCanada. It is oil that is not for our own consumption. It will be shipped tax free from our Gulf Coast to Europe and South America.
However, the ugliest part of this story takes place in the indigenous lands that are being destroyed forever. Alberta, Canada contains the second largest pool of carbon on the planet, second only to the oil fields in Saudi, Arabia. This oil is contained in sand that is accessed by mining. Once mined, it has to be heated using large amounts of natural gas. Then it must be further treated with massive amounts of fresh water. The resulting sludge has to be stored in huge seeping pools that can be seen from outer space. If all of this isn't bad enough, just to reach the tar sands oil a large swath of North American forest the size of the Florida must be removed forever. The people who have been living there for thousands of years, the First Nation Peoples, are already experiencing grossly disproportionate increases in all kinds of strange cancers from their polluted water and from the diseased animals that they depend upon for nourishment. Their life of hunting, fishing and just plain living is being destroyed. Native people from Canada reported this destruction and illness first hand when we were arrested together. The day I was arrested just happened to be chosen as the one to focus specifically on indigenous people's oppression as a result of resource extraction.
But the story gets even worse. James Hansen, NASA's leading climate scientist has said that opening up the Keystone XL Pipe Line to the tar sands oil would be like lighting a fuse to a massive carbon bomb. It would be "game over" for the climate. At this moment, the concentration of CO2 in our atmosphere is 391 parts per million. Before people began burning coal and oil, the CO2 measure was 280. James Hansen, who was incidentally arrested with us at the White House, and fellow climate scientists have concluded that CO2 in our atmosphere must be reduced to a minimum of 350 parts per million in order to maintain any semblance of life as we now experience it on earth. The earth is no longer the one we were born on. As a follow-up, a great source for keeping up to date on climate change issues is also http://www.350.org/.
So what does all this mean for us? What if the tar sands oil remains in the ground where it belongs? It will buy us some precious time to adapt to more sustainable energy sources that do not add carbon dioxide to our atmosphere. As it stands our whole economy and very way of life is carbon dependent. We even use it to fertilize our crops. I'm part of this problem. I've bought into oil. I own cars and I just flew across the US on a passenger jet to Washington, DC so I could take part in the climate action at the White House. I am not standing on the outside saying that others will have change. We must all choose to do this together; to be a part of the solution. That means no more cheap energy. Our way of life is coming to an end no matter what we do. The millions of cars, the brightly lit nights, the coal fired electrical plants ... this is all going to stop. I was in San Francisco recently and I just had an epiphany: I saw all the cars and noise stopping. This is the world we are entering. We can stop on our own by changing our civilization, our economic system and our government or we will be stopped by the laws of physics. Capitalism is killing the earth. If we intend to survive we are going to have to get off carbon fuels and transfer our energy systems to solar and wind as well as other sustainable energy sources. This will never, ever be enough to allow us to live the life we had that was enabled by exploitation of cheap carbon. And, pperhaps, over the long haul, more of us will have to risk arrest or whatever form of resistance we can contribute.
