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.
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