The BP oil spill goes on. And on. We watch the oil on live web cam pouring into the Gulf of Mexico. And we watch. Political rage is muted, practical responses even more distant. What to do? How do we “take action” on something like this? How can individuals meaningfully respond to this catastrophe? Stop driving? Boycott one brand of gas? Stop buying things made of plastic? Let’s not flatter ourselves. A few folks I know are planning to go to a local ARCO gas station (owned by BP) to protest, which will surely be a big moment for the minimum wage employee in the cash booth, and probably an irritant to the half dozen or more motorists waiting to fill their cars.

The numbing impotence we feel is painfully calibrated to our inability to affect what’s happening. Consumer choices we might make will have zero impact on this disaster, and can’t shape the larger dynamics of a globe-spanning, multinational oil industry either. Just listen to Democracy Now on Friday morning to hear how Chevron has destroyed thousands of square miles of the Nigerian delta in its incessant exploitation of the oil there, or how the Ecuadoran Amazon too is covered in vast lakes of spilled oil.

The deeper questions about technology and science are far from our daily lives. The world we live in is embedded in complex networks of technological dependencies, which none of us have chosen freely. Nor do any of us have any way to participate directly in deciding what technologies we will use, how they will be deployed, what kind of social controls will be exerted over private interests who organize and run them for their own gain, etc. (supposedly the federal government regulates them in the public interest, but that is clearly false as shown YET AGAIN by this disaster). The basic direction of science is considered a product of objective research and development, when it has always been skewed to serve the interests of those who already have economic and political power. Public, democratic direction for science and technology is not only non-existent, we really don’t even discuss it as a possibility!

British Petroleum should be given the death penalty. Oh wait! They don’t have death penalties for corporations. In fact, though they apparently have all the rights of individuals with respect to “free speech” (which they are free to buy at any price they wish), they cannot be held accountable as individuals for overtly criminal behavior. And even if they were, their bottom-line obsessing, litigation-phobic approach to the worst oil spill in history is just an example of normal corporate behavior in 2010. Their efforts to control press access and spin the story to their advantage have been consistent since the original accident, insisting on journalists being embedded on BP boats or planes so they can control what is seen and reported.

Penalizing corporate executives that get “caught” only legitimizes the rest of the criminal class in their everyday destruction of the planet. Maybe BP executives will be held criminally responsible (probably not), but the entity whose logic controls the behavior of anyone who is its executive is virtually immune. Unlike its political competitors in human form, the corporation is also apparently immortal.

The abject obeisance of the Obama government during the first 30 days of the oil geyser is a shame. Government ignorance and inaction, following the routine corruption that granted safety and environmental waivers to BP for this drilling project, should rock its legitimacy as much as Chernobyl did the Soviet government’s in 1986. I hope that blind faith in technology would also suffer a severe blow. Assurances about safe technology, proper safe guards, etc. are made about all our energy sources, from undersea oil drilling to nuclear power to the fictional “clean coal.” (Just last Tuesday I was speaking at a class at UC Santa Cruz where a couple of earnest students tried to argue that nuclear power was the solution to global warming!) This oil geyser resembles nothing so much as an uncontrollable nuclear meltdown. But rather than radiating thousands of square miles of countryside as happened in the Ukraine in 1986, this is filling the Gulf of Mexico with billions of gallons of crude oil. The sea is already dying, which is beginning to cascade into seaside communities and economies. The death of the Gulf will have unknown further effects on weather, ocean ecology, bird migration, and much more, and that’s before the massive underwater oil plume reaches the gulf stream in the Atlantic and does even more damage. It’s an insane, unwanted experiment in a foreseeable and preventable ecological catastrophe of unprecedented scope and severity.

Turns out that BP is closer to us, in a bigger way, than a lot of folks realize. Only a couple of years ago BP and the University of California at Berkeley signed a $500 million deal that will build a new biofuels research institute at the school, to be managed by BP and it is to BP that all patent discoveries will go. Obama’s Energy Secretary Steven Chu was the UC official who made the deal. Now his deputy energy secretary is the former chief scientist for BP! Maybe folks who want to protest this disaster should explore an alliance with the dynamic student movement that has already been in motion since last fall. Protest and obstruction do have their place.

Nature in the City's new proposal for a 10-mile "wild" corridor.

But other things are afoot in San Francisco too of a more affirmative nature. A couple of weeks ago the Public Utilities Committee of the Board of Supervisors held a well-attended public hearing regarding new ways of working with local water supplies from ground water and storm water to rain catchment and graywater. On Wednesday night Nature in the City presented their new campaign for a Bioregional Park (PDF) in the heart of San Francisco, a long-term feature of which is a 10-mile corridor that sweeps from the Presidio in the north down the spine of the City’s major peaks and then angling east across McLaren Park to Bayview Hill and Candlestick Point.  A natural corridor that knits together as many existing open spaces and parks as possible, planted with native plants to restore basic habitat for local critters, bugs and plants, would also help them to migrate through the urban environment. Bikeways, hiking paths, even daylighted creeks could be part of this.

And the SF Bike Coalition just announced their new campaign Connecting the City—San Francisco's Crosstown Bikeways for All (which is not as ambitious—after all these years—as a modest little flyer I put out in 1987 calling for a City of Panhandles). So far it’s a campaign to raise money, but it demonstrates a willingness to finally push for a more serious challenge to the dominance of private cars over our public streets. It’s a campaign that dovetails nicely with the notion of a wild corridor, new ways to think about watersheds and underground creeks, and more. It’s welcome development for the bigger agenda of altering how we live.

Ultimately these small choices are the only way we CAN start to lay a new foundation, technologically and socially, for a real transformation of life that will preclude disasters of the magnitude in the Gulf. A materially comfortable life for all should be the goal of a creative and energetic campaign of social and technological re-invention so that we radically reduce our use of energy, water, and other materials.

Combining the various incipient insurgencies for other uses of public streets, maybe we can start by getting some accurate numbers. What percentage of the land area of San Francisco is covered in public streets? What percentage of that street area is dedicated to cars as opposed to bicycles, pedestrians, or even transit lines (obviously buses use the same streets as cars, but not nearly as many streets as cars; nor do they generally park curbside)? What percentage is open space, parklands, sidewalk gardens, etc.? What are the largest contiguous zones of open lands not built on in some fashion?

I propose that once we get the numbers, which we can only guess at now, it will be possible to raise the demand for a specific percentage of city streets being permanently turned over to new uses, including daylighting subterranean waterways, building city-spanning parkways for crosstown bicycling, walking, and for the critters, scurrying and slithering. What do you think? Five percent of the streets converted to new auto-free uses? 10 percent? 25 percent? How far can we go?

Our era is characterized by a profound impotence in the face of national and global breakdowns. We don’t have a political vision, let alone a movement of movements, ready for prime time. We have to build the capacity to reinvent life one block, one neighborhood, one city at a time. The good news is that thousands of your friends and neighbors are already involved in just these efforts. Paul Hawken in his book “Blessed Unrest” identifies 30 million grassroots environmental organizations around the world! He calls them the immune system for Earth. Let’s hope the immune system will behave like our own bodily immune systems, and start killing the threats to our global health, the corporations that left unchecked will certainly kill us and everything else on the planet.

StreetUtopia is a new community organizing effort centered in North Beach. Launched by Hank Hyena and Phil Millenbah at an inaugural event in early January, they drew upwards of 150 people to an empty historic storefront at 1 Columbus Avenue, where they showed Streetfilms, had a small art exhibit, and conducted a survey of the folks who turned out. Hank Hyena explained his motivation in terms of European cities which are often greener, more bike-friendly, and with more pedestrian-centers than US cities. Along with several other parents of children at Yick Wo Public School, including co-instigator Phil Millenbah, a San Leandro city planner, they staged an inspiring evening of art, film, and conversation.

The questionnaire they handed out at the event started with a brief paragraph, assuming that we are on the cusp of a carbon-constrained transition to a future with far less cars:

The “modern” era brought television, automobiles and other technological changes. As part of this cultural transformation to the modern era and to support automobile use, society built millions of miles of paved roadway as both streets in urban areas and as highways connecting urban areas. The “postmodern” world is carbon constrained and the focus of transport is bus or rail and the old the roadway infrastructure is not needed in the same capacity. What should be done with the old infrastructure?

Then it asked a series of questions about whether or not Columbus Avenue should be closed to cars, if there should be “flex-streets,” if Washington Square should have a fountain, and what kinds of mixed-uses North Beach streets should have if cars weren’t the only priority?

Subsequently, I interviewed both Phil and Hank about StreetUtopia and their organizing, which you can read after the jump:

A hopeful vision of a future Grant Avenue.

Phil: Our idea was to create a place that was fun to share ideas of our visions of the city. Land use has gotten so contentious in San Francisco that we wanted to do something that was free of all of that. Instead of promulgating our opinions about how closing a street increases local business activity, we showed films from around the world where business owners told their stories of what great results came from closing a street.

There are two of us but there are others around who we talked with over time and the idea developed through these talks with others in the North Beach Community. Something we are also working on is quantifying the personal and cultural infrastructure of the community [with a] GIS database and series of maps for all of North Beach. We are going to go from building to building and note what happens at each place. We are also working with a senior group and mapping all of the seniors in North Beach. There is word that the COIT 39 bus is going away—a bus used by many seniors. We hope that our map would help us bring in a jitney service if needed and then we could route the service based on our mapping. This is all community internal stuff. We aren’t looking for press or anything, we just want to help the community. There is really an unintentional retirement community developing in North Beach—lots of people growing old in place—and they need special services, like having a place to meet and be social.

We found lots of people needing places to meet. Café Culture is nice but many people would just like to sit down and enjoy the day and not have to buy anything. We need a street farmers’ market or at least some more food sold on the streets. We would like to see more streets converted to pedestrian uses and we would like to see our local business people do well—and our residents have a great place to live.

Lower Columbus: an empty sea of asphalt, what a waste of space!

Hank, explaining some of the more than 100 responses to their questionnaire:

They did not want many things that I wanted, for example, they don't want a fountain in Washington Square. (I want one because kids like them, they are pretty, and in an Italian tradition) but the residents here really don't care for fountains. They see the water use as wasteful, plus it just attracts pigeons. The people surveyed were not interested in closing the main, touristy part of Columbus because they thought that would be detrimental to the tourist industry. However, they were interested in closing off lower Columbus, from Washington Street up to perhaps Broadway, making that section pedestrian-only. I am not sure why people suggested that—perhaps because it is a rather dead part of town and they thought pedestrian-only would liven it up. But they are amenable to making upper Grant auto-free. The main thing the survey revealed is that North Beach residents want more public space, park space, open space, places to mingle and gather.  There is interest in the "Poet's Plaza" space, closing off Vallejo to traffic, but there is impatience that it is taking so long. North Beach residents want things like more parks, community centers, and general open areas to gather and mingle, and this makes sense, because North Beach is very crowded with very little public space.

Phil: People seemed to like our “Flex-space” idea a lot. Flex space to us is space that is used at different times for different things. 25 percent of San Francisco is streets. People seem very open to closing some for human activities or what I call Postmodern street activities. I sold my car 3 years ago and am a full time pedestrian and transit user. I look at cars really differently now. I keep wondering who abandoned this big piece of metal on the street. Cars seem too wasteful and expensive and people keep putting a large share of their income into them. It is really self-indulgent that people expect to have a public place to move their big piece of metal around. We need that space for living life!

CC: By using the name StreetUtopia you probably inspire a lot of people to think more 'out-of-the-box' than they might otherwise. How has using the word/idea utopia helped or hindered you in your first public forays?

Hank: Phil and I are a good team, he is a city planner and he knows the nuts and bolts of enacting change, getting permits, paying fees, etc.  I am a futurist writer (for H+Magazine) and I promote notions like In-Vitro Meat, Nude Swimming for Longevity, and Robot Servants and SexBots. Utopia will be achieved one-step-at-a-time, and Phil is good at seeing the first step, while I am perhaps more interested in the year 2050. We are a mixture of pragmatism and imagination.

Phil: We want a happy place and some of these ideas are really axiomatic—they have been tried around the world and they work. I don’t see why there is this culture of unhappiness where so many people fight tried ideas for better spaces. Meanwhile our neighborhood is clogged with cars.

CC: You showed Streetfilms at your event, and had proposals floating to close all or parts of Grant Avenue to car traffic. What kind of responses did you get?

Hank: StreetFilms are great - the public really enjoyed the films! I think a lot of people were as shocked as I was to find out that cities like Bogota have more progressive urban planning than San Francisco.  Personally, I am interested in Grant because it is the oldest street in San Francisco; it has immense historical value and I believe we should honor and support the street, and work to revitalize it.

CC: How do bicycle boulevards and wider sidewalks fit in to StreetUtopia thinking? Are you inspired by Copenhagen or Barcelona or Paris or ...?

Phil: Barcelona inspired me. They have streets that are closed by the police in early evening with these nice, well-designed gates. Those streets are immediately full of people walking together and talking. Many mothers and children walking hand-in-hand, talking. Now that’s a good life! … I wish people would try more things. I remember Spiro Agnew said “I don’t believe in change for change’s sake.” I can’t make sense of that sentence, but I think that he is saying that he is afraid of new things, and many people are. I wish that we experimented more with our communities and if something didn’t work, fine, we do something else. But it almost seems like the outcome of an experience, such as the Mayor’s closing the Embarcadero a couple of times last year, needed to be determined before the approval was granted. I also think people need to focus more on design issues and not on just whether to approve or deny something.

Hank: I was very inspired by the "bike lifts' in Norway that took cyclists up hills, because many people often say that San Francisco can't be a bicyclist's town due to the hills.  Copenhagen is also very inspiring because they have inexpensive bikes that you can rent on the street and San Francisco should duplicate that. Honestly, I see North Beach as having more potential for pedestrians: it is very small and crowded and scenic.  There is a LOT of support for widening sidewalks because they are so crowded, almost impossible. I generally walk in the street, because there are so many dining tables and chairs on the sidewalks. North Beach also has many lovely interesting little alleys that should be developed for walkers, closed to traffic and beautified.

Telegraph Hill viewed from the Bay. High-rise apartments from an earlier era tower over Russian Hill further west.

He skirted Market Pond and made his way up to the Wiggle. Passing through a green arching gate he rolled along next to a long aging wall that had seen better days. On the other side of the wall used to be some kind of warehouse or big store. Now it was a grassy knoll sloping down to Market Pond.

On the crumbling 110-meter long wall was an old mural from the late 20th century. A clever mural within the mural showed the city, starting from a pre-deluge downtown full of cars and bikes and heading past itself to show Hayes River turning into a path to the west to the beach where a huge snake became a bicycle tire track. The mural was considered a civic treasure from the time before and a lot of trouble had been taken to save it after successive quakes and major storms.

At the end of the wall he went over the rushing creek and the high-arching Sans Souci Bridge, steering clear of oncoming cyclists. The veloway followed the winding course of the Hayes River, willow and laurel trees studding the banks, along with impatiens and lupine bushes. Many spots along the creek were open to the surrounding homes, mostly old Victorians that had elegantly stood along this waterway since it had been buried in cement culverts long ago. The lush gardens that filled the small valley gave off a wild variety of sweet and organic smells in the moonlight.

--from After the Deluge, A Novel of Post-Economic San Francisco (Full Enjoyment Books: 2004)

I wrote that passage in my novel a few years ago, set in San Francisco 150 years in the future. Imagine my pleasure when I found out that an ornamental portal to the Wiggle is the first project envisioned by some activists along our much-loved route. A week ago I sat down on the Wiggle at Bean There Café with Morgan Fitzgibbons, one of the instigators behind the new Wigg Party, whose mission is to have the folks who live and ride and eat along this route “become the leading community in America in the transformation to sustainability.” Recognizing what more and more people are coming to grips with, that we’re on the cusp of a dramatic change in how we live in cities, and on earth, the Wigglers want to lead the way, taking action one community at a time, anchored in place. Given the high mobility and transience of so many young San Franciscans, a focus on a local neighborhood as a site of transformation is immediately encouraging.

The incipient Wigg Party doesn’t yet have a website or an office, but about 15 people have come together after Fitzgibbons started some sustainable business consulting, and the ideas snowballed. It started to become a more comprehensive vision just this past July, as the group is organizing more consulting, an educational effort they’re calling the “Great Re-skilling,” a “Gateway to the Wiggle,” and a local currency effort (wigg-bucks? Tender wiggles?).

Why not turn whole streets into a City of Panhandles?

"I’ve read the Transition Handbook, Rob Hopkins’ work. I’m familiar with the movement. We’re not connected with them even though I should… I kind of disagree that we have these twin peaks of peak oil and climate change and that’s where it all comes from. I took the Permaculture Design course in the fall with Kevin Bayuk… "

Imagine a transformed Wiggle:

“An edible foodway, sculpture gardens at some spots, see if we can get people on the Wiggle to participate in window box programs, and if we can get the Panhandle recognized as part of it. Then we can put all sorts of things there. If we can get the whole roadway opened up for art, maybe stencils…We’re going to take a lot of inspiration from City Repair (in Portland)… Maybe we could get the entire Wiggle closed during Rush Hour!”

The Wiggle Valley, 1860s.

Unlike a long tradition of San Francisco radicalism, Fitzgibbons, sees his own agenda as compatible with the business world. I pressed him on this, skeptical as I am of any future for the buying and selling of human time. Perhaps he is representative of his generation of post-Left, post-neoliberal activists, or maybe his youthful optimism hasn’t yet been tempered by years of frustration with the stupidity of the modern work-a-day world.

“I come from a social entrepreneurial world in a way. I try to overcome these distinctions between nonprofit and for-profit. There’s this new model emerging, and the idea is to be able to turn a profit on a business that is performing a social good. Then we can bring in money for some of these other good projects we have… the profit businesses are a backyard garden business and a home audit business…”

To be sure, we’re all compelled to make compromises with respect to surviving in a capitalist economy, and there’s nothing new (or wrong) with taking the money we DO make at work and channeling it towards something more humane and worthwhile. I’ve done as much throughout my life. But I balk at the notion of profiting from doing social good, the bedrock concept of “social entrepreneurialism.” In my opinion, profit is derived from one of two sources: squeezing the paid employees, or externalizing costs to the greater public. If you are in a new market niche where there is little or no competition, you can charge high enough prices to escape the iron hand of the market for a while… but once competition enters, the path towards profitability and survival is invariably lowering labor costs and lowering costs of materials, waste, distribution, etc.—what gets called “efficiency” in capitalism, but is as often as not a brutal process of reducing people’s standards of living, and/or dumping costs (transit, waste, etc.) on to an acquiescent public sphere.

The success of the Reagan/Thatcher neoliberal transformation going back well over a generation was to discredit government and the public sphere, to the point that a concept like “social entrepreneurialism” can sound progressive. But it reinforces a society that frames owners of wealth as social/historical agents and the rest of us as the silly putty with which they attempt to achieve their goals. In any case, Fitzgibbons and his cohort are very well-intentioned, and certainly in tune with a rising social movement towards Transition and Resilient Communities. I’ll give him the last word:

“That’s really the whole game, is to get people to reorient their priorities and change the world… I’m a philosopher, and I have a new world view that allows for a new kind of faith that makes sense, based on evolutionary metaphysics. I think we’re in an evolutionary process. The question is where is it going, and more specifically what are we to do? And the answer is we don’t really know what the telos is. We don’t know the ultimate answer, so all we know is we have to create sustainable cultures, so the people can come behind us and have a better answer than we do.  And that gives our lives meaning, to create that culture, that’s what we have to do.”

Wigg Party meetings on 2nd Wednesdays, next: February 10, at 1571 Fulton Street, the “Sunshine Castle,” social 8:30, meeting 9… morganfitzgibbons@gmail.com

Bicycle traffic jams ahead on the Wiggle!

He points out that higher-priced transit
alternatives, such as commuter rail, can prevent at least some of that
group from opting for the perceived superiority of the automobile:

Not everyone wants to put up with this. Photo by Shira Golding via Flickr.

I
live walking distance from the Woodside LIRR station, and there are
times when I will spring for the $5.75 or whatever it is and be home in
25 minutes (if I’m near Penn Station to begin with). Of course, the
commuter rail lines don’t stop in very many places and they don’t all
have convenient schedules, but when it works out it’s great.

There’s
[another] option: express buses. As I understand it, many routes were
specifically designed to capture some of the market that was leaving
the transit system. There was one time when I needed to read books and
articles and take notes. The subway was impossible: even if I got a
seat, there was nowhere to put the book while I was writing the notes.
I tried taking commuter rail, but it was actually too fast to get
anything done. What worked pretty well, though, were the express buses.
For at least part of every trip I had two seats to myself, and was able
to spread out. Even when I didn’t, the seats were wide enough that I
could manage. And it was quiet: cell phone conversations were kept to a
minimum, nobody was rowdy or intrusive. On the way home in the
evenings, I think half the bus was snoring.

The
commuter trains, of course, are full of people who feel like they’re
well off enough that they don’t want to put up with the noise and dirt
of the city. Some of them were born to it, others strove for it. The
particular express bus route I rode, I noticed, was full of older black
and Puerto Rican women. I never had much of a conversation with them,
but I got the feeling that they had taken the subway when they were
younger, but after twenty or thirty years in whatever office or bank
branch they worked at, they were too old for that. They had earned the
$4 price of the bus ride, and the extra time it took to get to Midtown,
and they needed it to keep their sanity.

Without the express bus
system, these women would be driving cars. Without the commuter trains,
the suburbanites would be driving into Manhattan too. These modes are
helping transit to work for the middle class. They work. Let’s use them
more.

Of course, with operating budgets under
intense pressure around the country, many transit systems are becoming
less comfortable rather than more — and the price of a ride is going
up, to boot. With ridership remaining strong, how are municipalities
going to fund the kind of transit systems we need for the future,
systems that can attract and retain riders who feel that they’ve earned
the right to a comfortable commute?

If you’ve got that figured out, let us know in the comments.

Second Avenue Sagas has this proposal: Use market-rate parking to fund transit.

Plus: M-bike.org has some thoughts about yesterday’s NY Times piece on Detroit’s "potential to become a new bicycle utopia."

I was glad to see “We Are the World” on the ridiculously inadequate Climate Change bill that finally emerged from the corrupt U.S. Congress. Sadly, the bill could only emerge with the support of a number of mainstream environmental lobbyists in DC, who clearly have sold out to get something, anything, in the direction of addressing the climate catastrophe. Here in San Francisco there’s an inordinate amount of enthusiasm for the Bike Plan getting okayed by part of the city government, even though it’s still under an injunction, and even when that finally gets lifted, it’ll take three years to finish this Plan, one which will have relatively little effect on this car-dominated city. In some strange way the Climate Bill and the Bike Plan are eerily similar: sources of great pride to those who believe in incremental change, “the best we can do in the current political climate” to political realists, but falling way short, sorely disproportionate to the actual needs they ostensibly address. (An article in the UK Guardian Weekly June 5-11 edition “Climate Change Creates New ‘Global Battlefield’” quotes a new report from Kofi Annan’s Global Humanitarian Forum that there are already 300,000 deaths a year due to the warming climate, and 300 million people have already been affected!)

I’m not saying anything that most people can’t readily see if we pause from our daily frenzy long enough to think about the bigger picture. I’ll go out on a limb (barely) and say here and now that the Climate Catastrophe conference scheduled for Copenhagen, Denmark in December will fail to do anything meaningful. It’s not hard to predict, since even with a 60-vote Democratic (comedian-reinforced) Majority in the U.S. Senate, there’s no chance of a treaty being ratified that addresses the structure of the U.S. economy or the geographic arrangement of our dwellings, our transit infrastructure, or our energy use. And yet, this is simply what is necessary to have ANY CHANCE AT ALL of averting catastrophic ecological and economic collapse… funny to think that things are that stark, and hard to see if we don’t stop and look, but there it is.

Bike and Irreligious Pride! Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence indulging in the June 09 Critical Mass...

I get a lot of readings coming my way. Here’s a few to help you source what I’m arguing, in case you’re not sure—"this all seems rather hysterical," “the sky isn’t really falling is it?”, and so on… In the June 29 New Yorker, Elizabeth Kolbert profiles James Hansen, the NASA director who was shut up by Bush Administration decree, but wouldn’t go quietly. He’s still at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and in the article, Kolbert traces his emergence as one of the world’s most eloquent and urgent climate catastrophe bell-ringers.

NASA scientist James Hansen (left) gets busted protesting coal. (Photo: Rainforest Action Network)

Hansen has now concluded, partly on the basis of his latest modeling efforts and partly on the basis of observations made by other scientists, that the threat of global warming is far greater than even he had suspected. Carbon dioxide isn’t just approaching dangerous levels; it is already there. Unless immediate action is taken—including the shutdown of all the world’s coal plants within the next two decades—the planet will be committed to change on a scale society won’t be able to cope with… Speaking before a congressional special committee last year, Hansen asserted that fossil-fuel companies were knowingly spreading misinformation about global warming and that their chairmen “should be tried for high crimes against humanity and nature.”

Lately, he’s taken to marching on coal plants, and was even arrested recently. I’ve enjoyed the brilliant and funny tv spots by This Is Reality who have been doing a good job of ridiculing the rhetoric around “clean coal.” (And let’s not forget, this is the centerpiece of Obama’s energy strategy!) Not only is coal not clean, it’s about the dirtiest technology going, and if you look at what’s happening in West Virginia now, with mountaintop removal becoming the norm, it’s hard not to grow numb with despair or want to do something drastic.

The new Orion magazine has some good articles and photo essays in their July/August 09 issue on coal, but in their typical fashion, they manage to put together a treatment that goes a lot further than the basic facts. Photographs by Rick Stevens show the effects of mountaintop removal up close on the ground, but in a way that aestheticizes what should be simply ugly and monstrous. A short companion essay by West Virginia native Ann Pancake makes the point:

The photos take the ugliest landscape I’ve ever seen, the one that hurts me most profoundly, and make that landscape also beautiful. “A terrible beauty”; it was Yeats I first heard in my head. Rick has a more fitting and original phrase. He calls it “ruthless elegance.”

West Virginia is being destroyed for coal, one mountaintop at a time.

Aerial shots taken by activists are the only photos I’ve seen before this essay. Go to Mountainaction.org for the basic story with photos and videos. In West Virginia the economy has been coal-centric for two centuries, so breaking with it there is even harder than coastal latté-sippers figuring out how to reconfigure our utility bills and food-buying habits (though, as Derek Jensen argues elsewhere in the same Orion, “personal change does not equal political change,” an argument that I appreciate him making, even if he generally sends us into the cul-de-sac of blaming the “industrial economy” rather than capitalism, wage-labor, or specific technological choices and work patterns for our plight). Another piece (Hell Yes We Want Windmills) in the same issue introduces us to Coal River activists in West Virginia who are campaigning to replace the fantasy of “clean, carbon neutral coal” with wind farms.  

Caravan at the gate of Kingsnorth, UK, Climate Camp 08, Kent, 9 August 2008 (photo: metamute.org)

As activism has grown around the planet, the rising call is not simply to address the Climate Catastrophe, and certainly not to blindly assert that “everyone must make sacrifices,” but rather to see that the capitalist system depends on crisis, and never fails to use it to sharpen inequalities and reinforce power relations. “Climate Justice,” like environmental justice, is the answer beginning to take shape in the global south, and in many parts of the industrialized world too. Over in Newcastle, England, near the border with Scotland, a conference was organized last November (Class, Climate Change and Clean Coal--the Climate Campers and the Unions) bringing together members of England’s storied National Union of Mineworkers with a motley crew of Climate Campers, mostly anarchist, to debate the role of coal going forward. England had a huge coal industry until the early 1980s when Margaret Thatcher decided it was the perfect target for her larger effort to break organized labor in the UK, an effort that proved fairly successful. John Cunningham (whom I had the pleasure of visiting in April) has a good account of this curious confrontation in the latest issue of MUTE magazine (A Climatic Disorder?) 

Tripods with Kingsnorth power station in the background, Climate Camp, Kent, 9 August 2008 (photo: metamute.org)

Long standing anarchist activist and ex-National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) official Dave Douglass issued a polemic against the [Climate] camp. He addressed the anti-coal bias of the Climate Campers alongside a perceived lack of class analysis within the camp and the wider green movement. There is undoubtedly a feel good anti-capitalism implicit in much of the discourse around Climate Camp that can exclude any consideration of class in favour of blandly utopian sentiment…against the fluffy anti-capitalism of much of the camp's official discourse, Douglass introduced the perspective of those who may not have ‘somewhere else' to go, locked into jobs and communities that a politics of exodus cannot easily address. The yearly anti-climate change roadshow attempts to offer a response to climate change that would destabilise business as usual, suggesting at least nominally anti-capitalist alternatives. However, its model of protest camp and sustainable community gleaned from the post-Seattle summit protests can seem too abstracted from everyday life to break the general perception that climate change exists ‘out there'… Its model of sustainability can also appear as a holiday in scarcity to the casual observer…

Climate Camp ran workshops on class and emphasised a ‘just transition' in the official booklet's dialogue with workers in carbon-based industries. This is the notion that a transition can be made to a non-carbon based economy that does not penalise the poor or workers in carbon based industries such as coal miners. It is an argument for responses to climate change that place social justice at the forefront of any structural shift in the economy. While it is often posited as a decentralised, autonomous response, it can also be part of a social democratic state-led one…

The conference often threatened to become nothing but the conjunction of two forms of reformism - trade unionism and environmentalism - disputing the response to climate change rather than providing a challenge to the commodification of the world that both climate change and capital are predicated upon... The central question the conference raised for me is how to formulate a response to climate change capable of resisting capital's own one - given that capitalism loves a good catastrophe from which to extract value. Is there an inherent connection between capital, disaster and labour?...

Alice Waters' Edible Schoolyard at MLK Jr. Middle School in Berkeley... one of the more coherent responses to the imperative towards Transitioning!