In the previous post, I addressed recent efforts to emerge from the comfort of my social cocoon and rejoin the human race. As such, I trained this past summer to be part of the Leadership Corps of the Climate Reality Project, a group of 17,000-plus social and environmental activists who’ve organized to communicate the stories of climate change and inspire urgency to act on this existential crisis.
To that end, I will on occasion be utilizing this blog—which has been from Day One a venue to promote the many forms and functions of storytelling—to talk about matters relating to the climate crisis with the same intellectual curiosity and comprehensive examination as my posts on craft, pop culture, and personal experiences.
I realize this is a subject that tends to provoke either denial or despair, but I have found that the more I learn about it, the more empowered I feel to effect change—and empowerment is the antidote to doomism.
Show of hands: How many out there are aware that on September 8, organized Rise for Climate rallies were held in ninety-five different countries, on seven different continents, in a grassroots effort to compel a dramatic, immediate, and legislatively mandated transition away from fossil fuels?
Probably not many of you—am I right? Lay some blame for that on the media. Even though the nightly news, to hear Al Gore accurately describe it, has become “like a nature hike through the Book of Revelation,” coverage of this past summer’s worldwide extreme weather—the record-breaking heatwaves, hurricanes, and wildfires, for instance—barely if ever connects it, even if only suggestively and nondefinitively, with human-caused climate change. Such willful denial—known as climate silence—can no longer continue: Mother Nature is now refusing to be ignored, and so, for that matter, is the environmental movement—both, it seems, have reached a tipping point.
As such, over 900 actions were taken this past month as part of the Rise for Climate initiative. The big assembly was up in San Francisco, ahead of Governor Jerry Brown’s Global Climate Action Summit on September 12–14; Los Angeles hosted a more modest event, focused on a local environmental campaign: the establishment of a 2,500-foot health and safety buffer between communities and urban oil-drilling sites—L.A. has 1,071 active wells, 759 of which are located within 1,500 feet of homes, churches, schools, and/or hospitals.
The gathering was convened on West 23rd Street in University Park, South Los Angeles, a tucked-away residential lane with Esperanza Community Housing on one side, and, behind a leafy redbrick façade, the two-acre AllenCo Energy drill site—with its twenty-one oil wells—on the other. For four years, residents of the underprivileged community complained of noxious odors, nosebleeds, nausea, and respiratory ailments. “One child living near the site was sent to the hospital with severe headaches, stomach pains and heart problems” (“The AllenCo Site,” STAND-L.A.). In 2013, after an inspection by the Environmental Protection Agency that “resulted in more than $99,000 in fines,” operations were suspended and AllenCo became the subject of investigations by multiple governmental agencies.
However, earlier this month, “AllenCo sent a written plan to the state Division of Oil, Gas and Geothermal Resources citing a ‘planned startup date’ of Oct. 15. It indicated that the facility would be staffed and operating all day, every day” (Emily Alpert Reyes, “Oil Company Says Disputed Site in South L.A. Could Reopen in October,” Los Angeles Times, September 19, 2018). For the residents of this South L.A. community, this issue is never closed—it’s a specter that looms, needlessly and perennially, over their daily lives; when a drilling moratorium was imposed on the site five years ago, all that meant was that their children’s health was assured for now.
THE LEGACY OF SYSTEMIC ENVIRONMENTAL RACISM
Environmental injustice, to be sure, is a repercussion of the aforementioned willful dismissal of reality, a pernicious practice that is hardly the exclusive province of the corporate news media when it comes to the political lightning rod of climate change. When Superstorm Sandy ravaged the Rockaways nearly six years ago, none of the local and federal aid so swiftly dispatched to the affluent end of the peninsula ever made it as far as the tenement high-rises:
“In low-income neighborhoods, homes filled not only with water but with heavy chemicals and detergents—the legacy of systemic environmental racism that allowed toxic industries to build in areas inhabited mostly by people of color. Public housing projects that had been left to decay—while the city bided its time before selling them off to developers—turned into death traps, their ancient plumbing and electrical systems giving way completely” (Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, [New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2014], 106).
In her powerful bilingual address at the Rise for Climate rally on September 8, community organizer and University Park resident Gabriela Garcia, whose own daughter suffered nosebleeds and bouts of dizziness during the years when the AllenCo drill site was active, reiterated the seemingly obvious question that’s been posed to her time and again: Why don’t you just move?
Seems reasonable enough, no? Logical, even. I mean, it would certainly be an expeditious solution to the problem, right? Just go elsewhere—how has that not already occurred to you? With the possibility that the oil-well site across the street from her home could reopen at any time, it seems elementary to ask: Why hasn’t she just, ya know, relocated?
“For us, at the end of the day, the most important thing is that Allenco’s walls remain closed. We deserve to breathe healthy air in our communities!”
~Gabriela Garcia #PeopleNotPozos#RiseForClilmate pic.twitter.com/HGPx031hfa— Esperanza CH (@EsperanzaCHC) September 8, 2018
Because that’s her neighborhood. Those are her streets. It’s where she’s raised her daughter. And if that doesn’t resonate with you—if you’ve never felt as part of an irreplaceable community of friends and neighbors—then you have missed out on one of life’s purest forms of pride, identity, and fellowship. My hometown in the Bronx is the most cherished place in the world to me; if it were under assault by the forces of extractive capitalism or any destructive intrusion, I can only hope it would inspire a tireless crusader the likes of University Park’s Ms. Garcia. We’re not the ones who have to leave, she asserted, AllenCo is. Amen to that.
A photo I took at the Rise for Climate rally at 801 West 23rd Street in South Los Angeles
So how do we help make that happen—in the name of all our neighborhoods?
ON CARE FOR OUR COMMON HOME
Well, here’s the good news: Resumption of operations at the drill site as soon as October 15 is somewhat quixotically ambitious on AllenCo’s part, given the multitude of regulatory hurdles—reviews, inspections, certifications—the company yet faces.
Here’s the even-better news: We’re not strictly dependent on those governmental safeguards—grateful as we are for them—in this particular case. You see, AllenCo doesn’t own the drill site; it leases that land. All that would be required to put a permanent end any further toxic oil extraction in University Park would be an immediate termination of the lease by the landowner—the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles.
“139. When we speak of the ‘environment’, what we really mean is a relationship existing between nature and the society which lives in it. . . . We are faced not with two separate crises, one environmental and the other social, but rather with one complex crisis which is both social and environmental. Strategies for a solution demand an integrated approach to combating poverty, restoring dignity to the excluded, and at the same time protecting nature” (Francis, “Laudato si’ (Praised Be): On care for our common home.” The Holy See, 24 May 2015).
When Pope Francis declared climate change a moral issue and called upon his 1.2 billion disciples to join the fight, it’s important to pause and appreciate what a departure that heralded from scriptural orthodoxy, which assures our dominion over all we survey, and endows us with the irrevocable license to exploit natural resources such as fossil fuels, “those things God has dumped on this part of the earth for mankind’s use” (Palin, Sarah. “Sarah Palin on State of the Union: Full Interview.” CNN video, 14:54. September 6, 2015.).
And, to their credit, so far “more than 120 Catholic institutions, including large banks, international organizations, religious orders and dioceses, have put Catholic teaching into practice by stepping away from investments in fossil fuels” (Archbishop Peter Chong, “Vatican Must Keep up Its Clear, Inspiring Leadership in Climate Crisis,” National Catholic Reporter, September 24, 2018). Now it’s time for the Archdiocese of Los Angeles to do its part—to practice what its Pontiff literally preaches.
Here’s how you can play a part: Contact the L.A. Archdiocese and ask them why they continue to lease land in a residential neighborhood to AllenCo in light of the Pope’s call for moral leadership on this matter. And if you’re a Catholic—surely I still know of few of those from the good old days—so much the better: The Church needs to hear directly and forcefully from its congregants. Talk to your local parish leaders, too—they may very well have personal relationships with colleagues here in L.A. who can let them know that word is spreading far from ground zero. Let them know an affront to even one small part of our global community is an affront to all of us.
We can play a hands-on role right now in the surging environmental movement: Even better than establishing a mandatory buffer, let’s get AllenCo evicted from South Los Angeles—or, in Church parlance, excommunicated. Because the soil that hosts our communities is consecrated ground, too. And if we can find it in our hearts to take a share of ownership in a neighborhood we have every reason to overlook, it’ll be that much harder to willfully deny that the next environmental event isn’t merely something happening “over there.”
The clock is ticking—are you registered to vote in the 2018 U.S. midterm elections? No? Luckily, it’s easy! Start here (it’ll take just a minute).
It’s a hard fight. I’ve expressed my own frustration with this issue in the past in regards to people who practically riot over wind turbines and would rather keep breathing in fossil fuel fumes than see a turbine on the horizon.
It is a hard fight, mydangblog, but here’s what my training with the Climate Reality Leadership Corps has taught me: Forget the deniers. Don’t even try to persuade them — they’re unreachable. Focus instead on the overwhelming majority of people who care about this issue but A) don’t even understand the basic science of global warming and/or B) don’t have the first idea how they can contribute to the solutions. Win over those folks — one at a time if necessary — and this movement snowballs exponentially. Encouraging receptive friends and colleagues to take baby steps into activism — like the one I suggest in the post above — will inspire future commitments to environmental action.
Excellent response!
>Why don’t you just move?
Yeah, why don’t you sell your home? I’m sure there’s a big demand for houses across the street from oil wells. After all, if you can afford to live in a low-income neighborhood or a public housing project, then why can’t you afford to live in the “affluent end of the peninsula”, or any other place where people are too rich to have to worry about environmental injustice?
This situation raises questions. “Why don’t you just move?” isn’t one of them
I suspect, Dave, the majority of folks who pose such a question to victims of environmental racism do so from an innocuous, even well-meaning standpoint: If your health is threatened by your immediate surroundings, then doesn’t it make sense to just, ya know, leave? It’s not a problem that needs to be addressed (and ultimately remedied), you see; it’s a fact of life — a cost of doing business — in a capitalist society.
Because what privileged people have always understood, even if only intuitively, is that “[r]unning an economy on energy sources that release poisons as an unavoidable part of their extraction and refining has always required sacrifice zones — whole subsets of humanity categorized as less than fully human, which made their poisoning in the name of progress somehow acceptable. . . .
“Through various feats of denialism and racism, it was possible for privileged people in North America and Europe to mentally cordon off these unlucky places as hinterlands, wastelands, nowheres. . .” (Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, [New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2014], 310–11; emphasis added).
And part of the reason I’m advocating for my readers to take an interest in this one very localized cause, aside from hoping to see an environmental injustice righted, is because it’s an opportunity to teach people that the climate crisis is a global problem — that we all breathe the same air; that practicing denialism — something liberals do, too (we deny the severity of the problem if not the actual science, hence the reason we ask stupid questions like Why don’t you just move?) — isn’t going to get this issue adequately addressed. And it’s in all our interests that we start asking — sooner than later — a constructive question, like What can we do about the undeniable climate change brought about by disaster capitalism and its extractivist practices?
>Why don’t you just move?
To continue w/ this…
The point of “Why don’t you just move?” is to say “you have the power to leave. You choose to stay. Therefore, whatever happens to you is your own damn fault and not my damn problem!”
It’s just a variation of “Blame the victim”
Indeed. Depending on who asks the question, it could come from a well-meaning (but deeply misguided) place, as in Rather than fight a David-and-Goliath battle against Big Oil, why not just uproot from your community and find a new (read: safer) place to live?
Or it could take the form of a critical indictment: No one’s forcing you to live there, so why not exercise a little agency and work just a bit harder for the good ol’ American Dream (read: picket-fence suburbia)? That’s the blame-the-victim mentality you identify, Dave. (And we have a long, ugly history in this country of blaming the poor for being poor.)
The point is, ignorance-based racism takes many forms. And until we come to terms with our environmental racism — both liberals and conservatives — we won’t be able to fully or adequately address the socioecological complexity of the climate crisis as identified by Pope Francis in his encyclical. That’s why I encourage everyone to take an interest in this one very localized campaign — to see what making a difference feels like. (Spoiler alert: It’s addictive.)
>a long, ugly history in this country of blaming the poor for being poor
Not just this country. It seems to be a universal trait
Although Marie Antoinette did not, as far as we can tell, actually say, “Let them eat cake” (“Qu’ils mangent de la brioche”) and indeed the quotation itself may have been invented, the attitude it expressed was quite common among the nobles of Eighteenth Century France, just before the French Revolution
Pope Alexander VI and others in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries considered the Papacy a cornucopia of wealth and indulgence, and neglected their religious duties and rising protests
The wealthy and noble classes of Eighteenth Century England justified their excesses on the grounds that they deserved it, and the poor did not, one of the causes of the Revolutionary War
According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let_them_eat_cake:
>The Book of Jin, a 7th-century chronicle of the Chinese Jin Dynasty, reports that when Emperor Hui (259–307) of Western Jin was told that his people were starving because there was no rice, he said, “Why don’t they eat (ground) meat?” (何不食肉糜), showing his incompetence.
I’m not the first to suggest this, but the present wealth gap — and general socioeconomic inequities and injustices — in America sometimes make it seem like we’re on the cusp of our own French Revolution. We’re going to need a revolution, quite frankly, in order to force the systemic changes required per this week’s report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in order to avoid the worst catastrophes staring down the barrel at us. What we need is to move from our current system of disaster capitalism to a sustainable model of democratic eco-socialism. (For further reading on this subject, I highly recommend Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate.)
We can all play apart in compelling that change. For starters, vote for candidates who will work for the environment. Hassle your governor to join the United States Climate Alliance. Take part in the Climate Reality Project — learn what actions you can take, and make your voice heard. A revolution is about people taking to the streets, and getting their hands dirty; the climate crisis presents an opportunity for us to reorganize the way we live for the 21st century. Capitalism is a man-made construct capable of being adapted, amended, or even done away with. (And one of those things is going to have to happen — in a Big Way — if we’re going to get a handle on climate change. Don’t take my word for it — that’s the conclusion of the global scientific community.) Read This Changes Everything: Klein lays out of vision of a fairer, more just, more ecologically sound world — one that’s within our power to have. Because as the examples you offer above demonstrate, Dave, revolutions have changed the course of history before. All we gotta do is rise up.
Who’s with me?
Why don’t you just move? It’s a question that I hear asked about the families I serve in my city. Anytime a “question” or “solution” contains the word ‘just,’ I just about want to throttle the individual asserting or asking. Bravo to you for your activism and attention to this, Sean. Given that a great many don’t believe in environmental changes (whaaaaa?), it’s important that we attend to our home, our environment, and care for it. You have a terrific platform for sharing information here–please keep it up. We will keep reading!
Also, I can’t stop singing the Billy Joel song now. 🙂
Aw, thanks, Wendy! (And apologies for the earworm!)
Indeed — whether asked by liberals (out of ignorance) or conservatives (out of animosity), a prompt like Why don’t you just move? demonstrates a staggering dearth of empathy. And empathy is a quality our world — certainly our country — could use a lot more of, given that His Orangeness seems incapable of either that or humility.
I’m just trying to use my platform, humble though it is, and my skill set (as a storyteller) to help tell the stories of climate change, which is really the governing directive of the Climate Reality Project. Among other benefits, working as an environmental activist actually gives me other things to write about, so I think it will bode well for the long-term creative health of the blog, even if the subject matter is a bit of a departure from the kind of personal essays and intellectual analyses of craft that have for the most part defined this website’s identity. I could even argue that the climate crisis is the story of our time (a horror story, at that), and the unifying theme of this blog has always been narrative.
Thanks, as always, for being such a steadfast supporter, Wendy, no matter which crazy direction I happen to steer this blog!
Okay, Sean–I did it. I just sent off my email to the archdiocese.
As it happens, I am Catholic, but that’s never been necessary to ask for mercy or justice from the Church, so if anyone else is holding back because of belonging to a different faith, that’s not necessary. Petitioning another diocese is unlikely to do much, however, since bishops and cardinals govern their sees pretty independently.
All other news notwithstanding, the Church does care. They/we can be glacially slow, but the wheels do turn eventually. Thanks for bringing this to my attention. I care about the planet, too. 🙂
Hey, thanks, Cathleen! Every action means something. Taking an interest in parishes outside one’s own serves to remind the Church, which can be insular with respect to its individual dioceses, that it is a global community — and a powerful one at that. And certainly a caring one, too. My cousin is a deacon out in Syosset, New York, and I know through his experiences that the Church, like any other monumental institution, is beholden to political machinations that by their very nature limit the speed of change, of progress.
Fighting climate change, ironically, is going to require both a rapid political transformation and a renewed sense of common humanity, of esprit de corps, of “we’re all in this together” — the very things big organizations, be them religious or governmental, seem built to resist. So, now more than ever, we need global leaders like Pope Francis — who has shown tremendous humility before nature — to provide a model for such swift, systemic conversions.
As grateful as we are to him for his leadership, though, as I discuss in “Dreaming Dreams and Seeing Apparitions,” we can’t wait for a savior to solve this. This is a global problem, and thusly requires a global effort: a commitment from each of us to play a part. As such, (sm)all actions matter; any expression of compassion is a meaningful act of leadership in its own right. So thank you for investing your time, your heart, and a little of your “Catholic capital” on University Park. The action you’ve taken today — the care you’ve demonstrated — is deeply appreciated, my friend; please know that.
It was my pleasure, Sean. 🙂
In this current political … I can’t even call it a climate, but you know what I mean … I’ve seen some of the most positive, happy and focused people I know slide into crippling despair. With each, I encourage them to act locally. And when they have, their sense of hope and empowerment returns.
In the particular case of AllenCo, I realize there is much I do not know from the opposite coast here. But I found myself wondering what I would do if I lived there. The first thing I would do (which I do in all such instances where the powerful attempt to disregard me) would be to start documenting my health concerns in detail—including any direct concerns but also including concerns of those around me or even rumors of concerns—and sending notarized copies to AllenCo and other agencies, just to have it on record. I would encourage every person I could from the area to do the same: document, document, document health issues and concerns, down to the smallest. Those who’ve had actual medical issues determined to have been caused by AllenCo could also open a class-action lawsuit. The more the merrier.
Money is the “root of the evil” here. And so seeing the potential for massive loss of money by way of mounting future lawsuits or a current class-action endeavor might make a difference.
Again, I hear you regarding environmental racism. And this ties in with knowledge, education, awareness of process, and more. But if someone could make it easy (a fill-in form letter?) to document health issues and concerns, along with perhaps supplying addresses and even envelopes and stamps, might it not be something nearly anyone could do? Numbers would matter. If the right agencies were flooded with these letters, there would be implied culpability on their parts as well. They knew. And that may put enough pressure on them to also seek to extricate themselves by getting involved to keep things shut down.
Al Gore often cites the political application of Newton’s Third Law: that for every action, there’s an equal and opposite reaction. I’m not going to suggest Trump’s environmental rollbacks and polices are a good thing — they aren’t — but if there’s something positive to have emerged from his ecological recalcitrance, it’s that it seems to have galvanized a (growing) green movement that isn’t going away this time, as it did on other occasions when we seemed poised to (finally) take meaningful legislative action on the climate crisis, such as when James Hansen sounded the alarm bells to Congress in 1988, or when An Inconvenient Truth won an Oscar in 2006 and made the abstract topic part of our mainstream discourse.
Many states and municipalities, for example, have doubled down on their commitment to the Paris Accord regardless of the president’s stated intentions to withdraw from it in 2020 (he can’t legally pull us out before that time). Furthermore, a new generation of Millennial congressmembers are making this a top priority (something I wrote about at greater length here), which will only compel any serious candidate seeking the Democratic nomination for president next year to make climate change the keystone issue of their campaign.
And for those counting on Silicon Valley technosolutionism to get us out of this existential mess, I have bad news and good news: The bad news is that magic-wand technology probably won’t be market-ready in time to avert the worst aspects of climate change. The good news? We already have the solutions to solve this problem — renewable energy sources including wind and solar — we simply need to decide that it’s time to stop subsidizing brown energy and start investing in green energy. To that end, the marketplace is already way ahead of the Congress. (Though the politicians are catching up: The bipartisan Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act, which you can read about here, is a real first-step solution under consideration in the House right now.)
So, far from being discouraged by so much of the environmental news and political gridlock, the last few months have filled me with more hope than ever. To be certain: The climb ahead is still steep, and the people with their hands on the levers of power aren’t going to give that up without a helluva fight, but this movement is now picking up speed — and supporters — exponentially.
I can’t say for certain whether STAND-L.A. (Stand Together Against Neighborhood Drilling), an environmental-justice coalition of community groups dedicated to raising awareness about the health and safety threats associated with oil drilling in Los Angeles, documents the various medical incidents endemic to drill-site communities, but you’re absolutely right, Erik, that what you suggest would be exactly the kind of thing any concerned citizen can do: That’s the sort of initiative “ordinary” people need to take (and are taking) in the aforementioned efforts to combat climate change. There are many green organizations that have the resources and infrastructure to support those type of efforts, which I will discuss a bit further in my response to your comment on “Dreaming Dreams and Seeing Apparitions.”