Supporting the Indigenous in Fossil Fuel Opposition Efforts

Tags

Divestment, Line 3

As some of you know, I have been struggling with writing about the Stop Line 3 effort ever since the PUC decision in late June to grant a Certificate of Need and Route Permit to Enbridge for their new Tar Sands Pipeline in Minnesota.  In the last week or two, I have been working to regain momentum and slough off the feelings of hopelessness so that I can begin again to write about this effort.

This past week I participated in a webinar hosted by Sierra Club – Sierra Forum: The Wave of Tribal-led Environmental Activism.  Three women involved in the work were present to give updates and answer questions from the community on this topic.  Tara Houska from Honor The Earth called in from Park Rapids just down the road where she is supporting a Resistance Camp in the fight against Line 3.  Also present were Sierra Club members Lena Moffitt who leads their Our Wild America campaign and Cesia Kearns from their Beyond Oil Campaign.

There was a review of a few of the many projects currently being opposed:

• Kinder Morgan – recently bought by Canada – facing massive resistance
• Bayou Bridge Pipeline – Energy Transfer Partners project in Louisiana
• Bears Ears National Monument – where 85% of the previously protected land is being considered for extractive activities, basically giving away the public land to corporate interests
• Mountain Valley – where citizens are working hard and earlier this month the “Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) ordered work stopped … (after) three federal appeals judges revoked two permits for the pipeline to cross the Jefferson National Forest, ruling that the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management had not properly reviewed the project before issuing the permits.”

In these situations, infrastructure is often being placed in areas where the Indigenous community is already facing other major obstacles to living in general.  These pipelines and extractive work bring threats not only to the water and land, but also to the people, including the risks associated with Man Camps.  As you may know, Native women are 10 times more likely to be murdered compared with other races. Their rates of rape are nearly 2.5 times that of white women who already face a 1 in 5 chance of rape over their lifetime.  [It should be noted that all these numbers are fairly tentative for a number of reasons, most notably under reporting.]

“They treat Mother Earth like they treat women… They think they can own us, buy us, sell us, trade us, rent us, poison us, rape us, destroy us, use us as entertainment and kill us. I’m happy to see that we are talking about the level of violence that is occurring against Mother Earth because it equates to us [women]. What happens to her happens to us… We are the creators of life. We carry that water that creates life just as Mother Earth carries the water that maintains our life. So I’m happy to see our men standing here but remind you that when you stand for one, you must stand for the other.”  ~ Lisa Brunner, Sacred Spirits First Nations Coalition

Lena did a wonderful job of noting that many conservation efforts were born out of protecting land that was Indigenous land.  Many have learned, through failure in doing it, that there is a great need to respect the Indigenous culture and to be be honest, transparent, intelligent, diligent, and kind.  A key is working with communities from the bottom up, not coming in with pre-baked ideas of what is needed.

There was also a short review of the positive work being done by Indigenous people to WIN against Fossil Fuels as Cesia described the successes of the Lummi Nation which defeated the largest proposed coal export terminal in the nation expected to export more than 48 million tons of coal per year with 30 miles of coal trains running daily through the northwest.

Much of the discussion was focused on how you can support the efforts of the Indigenous.

• Learn the history of your region.  Be deferential to the sovereignty of the Indigenous which entails unique authority and risks.  Listen to their asks to know what is needed.  You can find out more on how to help our effort at Stop Line 3.
• Respect the spiritual context of the Indigenous actions. [More on this below.] There was reference to the Totem Pole Journey that I found interesting.
• Support the work of organizations working alongside the Indigenous like the Sierra Club actions in fighting the current administration, especially Zinke opening protected lands to extractive technologies.   Bears Ears,  the first tribal nation initiated and designed monument, was recently reduced by 85%.  Comments of support are meaningful and you can help here.
• Divest from banks, stocks, and mutual funds that are supporting the fossil fuel industry.  You can sign a petition to commit to this effort.

Once you’ve divested, you might need some safe investments, which you can find at Fossil Free Funds.  And if you need a good broker, I’ve been working with Margaret Nucci for 15 years and she’s done great for us – and made terrific strides as I’ve pushed her harder and harder to find fossil fuel free funds.  She’s a joy to work with and she’ll listen to what your goals are and help you reach them in a way that works best for you.

With respect to honoring the culture of the Indigenous, Tara did an excellent job of explaining the nature of sacred places.  She noted that some feel like “to Natives, everything is sacred” and yes, all rocks, trees, and all of life is sacred.  But sacred places are burial places, ceremonial places, places that are part of a creation story… spaces that have been used for thousands of years by Natives, places with very specific meanings and historical significance.  When we lose these spaces, they are lost to us all.

I for one am hopeful to do what I can to help support the efforts of the Indigenous. One reason I believe so strongly in this is because treaties are the highest law of the land and we have seen that these treaty rights are often the ONLY way to win.  In our system where political officials are bought and paid for by corporate owners and thus no longer represent the people and are not accountable to the public interest, the legal system can sometimes be counted on to apply the law to assure corporate interests do not take authority over what is more important to most of us: clean water, air, and land.

I encourage you to do what you can to support the efforts to defeat fossil fuels as we transition to a new future, a renewable future, a future that ensures a livable planet for our children, their grandchildren, their grandchildrens’ grandchildren, and even THEIR grandchildren.  The Indigenous believe in protecting the Earth for the next seven generations.  It will take all of us to make it happen.

What is Work?

Tags

Money, Work

So recently, Dan and I met someone who is very inquisitive, like I am. 🙂  I was delighted and when she said, after asking a question about money, “That’s pretty personal, I know.” I assured her that we were open to answering anything we could for her.    I believe my exact words were, “I’d probably even tell you about how we have sex if you pressed me.”   Which, of course is perhaps the ultimate for some people and, unfortunately, brings up bad visuals… Uh, sorry about that.

Anyway, we were discussing the whole idea of retiring from the rat race and living more simply.  Of finding a way to get more freedom while avoiding poverty and homelessness.  A big part of the freedom is not working our lives away, not working for “the man” in the crazy hamster wheel of work-buy-store-get a bigger place to store more stuff-American Dream.  But don’t we need to do something to avoid poverty and homelessness?  Somehow, we need to have enough income to survive.  Scratch that.  We need to  have enough to survive. [More on this later…]

So she was pressing us on how much we work each week.  “Like is it less than 20 hours a week?”  We really struggled with answering this for a number of reasons.  One is that we don’t have a regular schedule in any sense of the word.   Most every week is a new schedule.  Some weeks we are traveling, some we are doing a lot of homebody stuff, some weeks we spend one day at the farm, some weeks, multiple days. Another reason is that we don’t have regular X-hour-a-week jobs.  We don’t have a regular schedule of “work”.  Even working at the farm is sometimes Monday, sometimes Friday, sometimes a full day, sometimes an afternoon following a trip to town.  I write for the paper occasionally – but that is very intermittent.  I believe I’ve written about a half dozen articles in the last year or so.  So it’s unsubstantial.

And when I mentioned that I spend a lot of time writing, especially with my blog, she was like, “But that’s not really work, right? That’s more about personal development.” At the time I tried to justify the blog writing because it’s kind of like independent journalism when I’m reporting on the PUC or Line 3.  And what about regular writers?  Is the time they spend writing only work when it’s going to be included in a published work? And now that I think of it, I realize, why wouldn’t my blog writing be considered work?  Is “work” only what we do outside the realm of our self?  Or is literally almost everything we do “work”?

And that’s when I realized that a bigger part of the trouble answering the “how many hours do you work a week” question is that it’s hard to define “work”.  Much of what we do is work – laundry, cooking, cleaning, even going to the bathroom – it’s all about getting something needed completed.  But I think the feeling about the word “work” in American society is more about “what do you do for money?” or “what do you do that you don’t like to do?”.  Is “work” what we do to make ends meet?  I asked a friend recently and he said, “Work is what you have to do to make a living.”  So, I said, “Well, you have to wash laundry, cook meals, and do dishes.” And he countered with, “No you don’t.”  And, of course, he is right.  You could have other people do your laundry, only use paper plates and plastic sporks, only eat at restaurants.  But, I guess those just aren’t options I want to consider – they seem so much more expensive and wasteful anyway.

So if I think about a recent week, I spent 6 hours at the Farm, 2 hours canning raspberries, 12 hours attending a Day of Resistance where I spent probably 3-4 hours doing helpful work, and 16 hours driving to and supporting an Honor the Earth Fundraiser concert, which entailed about 8 hours of real work and a lot of networking and enjoying the music.  So maybe you could say I spent about 20 hours of “work” time.

This past week, we spent a day hosting friends here at the Harn which entailed about 3 hours of cooking and tidying, I canned 4 quarts of green beans which was another hour or so of work. I attended a Board meeting which was another couple hours in prep and attendance. We spent about 4 hours prepping wood for the woodshed and stacking some in the garage in preparation for winter heating needs.  I spent an hour or two picking choke cherries and making 6 cups of juice from them – the jelly making took another hour or two, so let’s say about 3 hours altogether.  We spent another couple hours working on finishing out the arctic entrance on the porch side – it turned out real nice – we even added a shelf!  So that’s about 15 hours.  None of this work is paid but isn’t it helping us “make a living”?

When we do work, it’s not typically for a real company or boss.  We usually are working for ourselves.  Cutting wood, putting up food.  These are work I suppose.  I think that’s the hardest part, what exactly constitutes work?

The definition online for making a living is: “To earn enough income to support oneself and, if applicable, one’s family.”  And Income is “money received, especially on a regular basis, for work or through investments.”  If choke cherries help support the family by giving sustenance, shouldn’t they be considered “income”? What about firewood gleaned from the forest?  It’s heating our home for free so we don’t have to buy electricity to heat with a heater – isn’t that an alternative to income? Shouldn’t gathering firewood be considered “making a living”? Before money systems, barter was the method of the day.  And everyone was basically making things from the resources supplied by the Earth.  Weren’t they “working”?

It seems these days that money and work are inextricably linked.  But every day people are finding ways to unlink them.  Whether through barter or local “money” systems (based on hours worked, not dollars worth of work), there are lots of ways people work outside the money system.  My hope is that these efforts continue.  In writing this blog, I happened upon an interesting idea …

F•Day = Free Day = The day when the world’s largest economy revokes the monetary market system in favour of a collaborative, technological society based in nature, community and compassion. ~Concept of The Free World Charter

Definitely going to have to read more on this…  I’ll keep you posted.  And please, you let me know your thoughts on this idea, whether via comments below, FB, email, a phone call, or even a visit.

Photos courtesy of: http://www.thewriteratwork.com/site/archives001.asp & http://freeworldcharter.org/en

Hope Comes to the Harn

Tags

communication, fun, hope, turtle

So this weekend we finally hosted friends from Alexandria.  Dan and I are members of a group focused on Deep Listening and, while we kind of take the summer off, we decided to do a mini-meet-up for the gang here at the Harn.  It was a wonderful chance for a few new people to experience what we’re doing here and it was great for us to get some more feedback on the place.

We spent some time cleaning up the place which included a thorough sweeping and reorganizing of the porch.  We typically do this clean once in the spring, as we begin spending time on the porch, and once mid-summer to enjoy a clean porch for the fall season.  It is so grand to have everything organized again, especially since Dan has almost finished the wall in the porch to assure no Asian Beetle infestations in the arctic entrance (like we had last year).  Sherry was the one member of the group that stayed overnight and, as the most frequent lodger in the arctic entrance, we’ve named it “Sherry’s Nest”.  It’s her favorite place to stay here at the Harn, this little 7′ x 7′ “nest” in the woods.  Next time, I think she’ll bring her puppy to enjoy it with her.  We think this was her fourth stay, so she’s edging in on Sadie, our most frequent flyer.

We also worked on making a bunch of food: Amish oatmeal, rhubarb/apple crisp, roasted beets and beans, zucchini noodles, and Einkorn bread.  In fact, I’m really glad everyone was an afternoon arrival as I had decided to also cram in canning of 4 quarts of green, yellow, & purple beans from Merry Gardens Farm that morning.  Happily I was able to get most everything done before eleven.  What a busy morning!  We did get to listen in on Wait! Wait! Don’t Tell Me, which was highly entertaining as usual.

Guests started arriving in early afternoon with Susan and Mike arriving first – bringing fresh bread and hard cider, quickly followed by Sherry with Surly and sugar-free soda.  Lee and Reed were delayed by a turtle rescue near Itasca Park.  Said turtle was nicked by a passing driver, breaking the back end of the shell.  We quickly fixed it with, of all things, duct tape, and set the turtle into the yard to explore.  We named the turtle Hope and Hope found shelter in the shade and took a little snooze.  Hours later, as we headed out for a forest walk after a fine meal pulled together with watermelon and hummus from Lee, and we found Hope had headed off to new adventures.  We anticipate seeing the turtle again as we welcome this woods becoming a new home for Hope.

As I said, these friends are from our group that practices Deep Listening and I’d suggested that if we wanted to have a session, I thought Hope would be a good topic.  Our fearless leader, Lee, had looked for a topic and found one that seemed good, though not exactly Hope.  When she went to print out the quotes and discussion questions, the book magically opened to a study guide for Welcoming Hope!  Five of us enjoyed a lively, thoughtful, and thought provoking discussion of this topic.  Here are some of the things I gleaned from it:

• One member suggested that the seeds of hope are planted in times of strife. As I thought on this I realized that, indeed, when one is faced with “enough” of any negative situation, it does instill action with a sense of hope that things must improve.  I think about the Black Lives Matter movement and #MeToo.  These people were like, “This is enough, it’s time to stand, no matter what.” And look at the differences that are being made – slow progress, maybe, but progress nonetheless.  [I did hear that there is potential that Michael Brown’s case may be brought up for review in Ferguson and, investigating that realized that his mother is running for City Council – yahoo!  Here’s MSNBC coverage, Wesley Bell comes in about 5:35 to speak about his reasons for running and his victory.  Another win for The People!!]
• One shared simply that hope is an attitude that, when held, makes every day more happy, even if all that is hoped may not materialize.  It is my experience that, when I am hopeful, I am happier.  Hopes being dashed is difficult.  But I believe hope held is a most critical aspect of continuing to move forward in working for a cause.
• I commented on my current waning hope in the fight against Line 3 but was encouraged by one sharing that hope is perhaps more importantly about intention and motivation than it is about goals and outcomes.  The hope is in the process, I do see that.  I noted that, while we lost at Standing Rock in that the DAPL was built, we made huge progress in opening the eyes of many and, just this past week, a federal judge was set to rule on whether the DAPL line would need to stop pushing crude.  It seems that since the permits were issued without a proper review of the environmental impacts, the situation warrants reconsideration.  Here’s MPR’s coverage. The ruling was expected by August 10th but has been delayed until month end.  It seems some remain skeptical based on the last comment in this article.  Watching current events as those in power continue to side with corporations and rather than citizens, who can blame them?  But my realization was that, even my current work that may result in Line 3 still being built in Minnesota, is important work and I need to get back on the horse and continue to ride forward.

We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.   ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

 

Brosius After 5 Years

Tags

family, fun

So this past week, Dan and I have been at the (reportedly) “#2 Family Camp in the U.S.A.”, Camp Brosius in Elkhart Lake, Wisconsin.  I don’t know about all that, but it’s a fun place where we have friends we’ve been seeing since 1993 and we hadn’t been there in 5 years.  That last visit was the summer Tom was a counselor at Camp Brosius.  Lots of good and bad stories from that last time.  And good and bad from this time too, though we’ll stick with the good.

We were proud to arrive first, ten minutes early and about 9 minutes before the next car arrived, carrying the Sirotas!!!  These are good family friends with Tom and Karina growing up in the same group of campers through the years.  We were happy to see them and it had been so many years that their youngest looked about as old as their middle child was last time we saw them!  I kept thinking I would call him by his brother’s name!  He did teach us later in the week about Zombie Dice, which was awesome.  His mom won the first two rounds but he finally beat her in round three.  We also played Exploding Kittens.

We also had fun with all our Annex Friends.  Scott and Vickie, Rick and Mary, John and Rosalba, Andrew and new friends too!  We completed three, yes, 3, 1000 piece puzzles!  And we read some good books, more on that later…  We even won the Euchre tournament!  Great prizes provided by Mary were shared by the top teams who split them making both teams happy campers!

Met new friend Kathleen and while we did not prevail in the Brosius Euchre Tourney or the Cornhole Tourny, we can say we held our own in the Cornhole arena.  And we were playing young men.  We thought we didn’t have a chance but held the lead for multiple rounds!  In the end, they took us.  But we had a nice long game tossing the bags back and forth.  Also did some macrame with the craft group.

We ate a lot of great food and swam in the lake.  We saw Elkhart Lake (the village), ate at the Mexican place in Plymouth (El Sombrero) – great food and staff, and shopped at Fleet Farm – discovered Dried Peas!!  We did it all.  Dan read more than me: On Tyranny, Hiroshima, Howard Zinn Conversations on History and Politics, and A Nation of Immigrants by Kennedy – all currently relevant.  He’d read this last one in 7th grade and it’s eerily relevant.  I read the first and half of the third books above.  I was too busy puzzling for much more reading than that.  But I was impressed with the On Tyranny so watch for a Book Review on that next week.

It was a good week of relaxing, not worrying about anything but chatting, enjoying the breeze, and eating with friends and family.  Even took a nap one afternoon.  It was lovely and we are grateful to Aunty Reetz for providing such a wonderful opportunity.

Next year, maybe we’ll get Tom there…