Author: Sophia Katz (Page 1 of 2)

Lois Gibbs is the founder of the Love Canal Homeowners Association and a primary example of a leader fueling grassroots activism. Her story as both a victim and staunch leader are important for understanding the value behind the tragedies that occurred at love canal in the 1970s. Through a creative writing piece, I hope to tell the story of love canal from her perspective. Discussing the injustices she and her neighbors suffered as well as the ways she organized her community against the government to produce a powerful environmental activism story. Her story is more than one about Love Canal but about the relationship between citizens and government in a democracy and the need for individuals to speak out and demand justice when the government will not act in their favor. The way Gibbs transformed her frustration and despair into positive actions and behaviors to overcome the challenges in front of her is model on activism for us all. As a women in the late 1970s, challenging the state government and a large multibillion dollar petroleum company was not easy or pleasant. The creative memoir will explore her struggle and tell the story of love canal with information about the people living in Love Canal, factual data, and context to support the narrative. This creative writing piece will supplement the mapping data I produced on the Love Canal Homeowners Association. I will be reading Gibbs’ biography and other sources on Love Canal to support my research.

One of the tenants of permaculture is trying to understand nature through observation. It seems strange that after much development within the scientific field that would let us observe nature in more complex and innovative ways, we have used our new access to science to create technologies harmful to our environment. It would make more sense if through science we concluded that farming and agricultural production is best when nature can run its natural course. But that would be actually understanding science. Instead, Masanobu Fukuoka in The One Straw Revolution highlights the hidden bias within the scientific method. There is a underlying assumption that we know what is best and must find alternative ways to fix environmental problems. As Fukuoka says, “The irony is that science has served only to show how small human knowledge is” (29). As it turns out, our very own actions result in larger consequences like tilling the ground which depletes the oxygen supply or spraying pesticides that kill predators and create insect problems. The truth is that humans do not understand nature enough to prescribe medications to fix it.

Masanobu Fukuoka describes the way he allows nature to act on its own. While it requires no unnatural prescriptions, it requires a lot of energy, patience, and knowledge. When we let nature do the work on it own, we create a regenerative system. This regenerative model is much more efficient than the sustainable one, which aims to use technology. With a technological mindset, our goal is convenience through mechanization. However, such processes like grinding rice into flour will break down grain into its byproducts and we lose all the important nutrients (166). Afterwards, the sustainable model forces us to produce dietary supplements to reenter the necessary nutrients into our diets. Part of sustainability is trying to maintain things at a certain level. However, instead of trying to fix issues all together, we end up recreating technologies to fix our mistakes and sustain our circumstances from getting worse. Ultimately, a model that prioritizes nature to fix and rebuild itself is best.

Citations:

Fukoaka, M. (1978). The One-Straw Revolution: An Introduction to Natural Farming. New York: New York Review Books.

Rebecca Solnit provided me with a helpful framework for finding hope in a challenging and disappointing world. For her, hope is not about absolute optimism and trust but rather recognizing that in the world that surrounds us there is both hope and damage. This dichotomy or intersectional approach carries through her piece, Grounds for Hope. The now is an “extraordinary time” but also a “nightmarish time.” How is that so? It works out that understanding hope, as defined by Solnit, is accepting the threats to our privacy posed by major tech companies and to our environment exacerbated by climate change. Despite this darkness, we have to appreciate and find hope in the social justice movements that were established and did spread positivity and equality. These movements are examples of finding hope today. They did not ignore the cynicism and challenges that surround us but instead rooted themselves in it in order to grow from it.

As a lover of the environment and someone educated about climate change, it is often easy to lose hope while watching the people around you show no care or intent on providing for a better earth. It becomes easy as an environmentalist to take on the optimistic or pessimistic approach outlined by Solnit. Either to ignore the problems in the world and push one’s own agenda forward or alternatively, to accept your reality and do nothing. Hope situates one in the middle, where critical thinking and common sense exist. In this position, acting is still possible and acting effectively is possible.

Memory plays an important role in hope. Solnit suggests that the way in which we think about the past and tell of the past can change our view of hope in the present. If we remember the past as filled with failure and disappointment, then we cannot recognize the ways in which things have changed or possibly improved. She gives an example of the times when gay bars were raided because being gay was illegal. In order to move towards a future of marriage equality and justice for all sexual preferences, we must recognize the improvement from these times.

Such a mindset is necessary for our activism project. We can easily recognize a past in which divestment was rejected and ignored by the Duke University administration. Or we can remember a time in which people spoke our, conversation begun, and we were given answers. Since the administration claimed there was a lack of conversation among students about divestment and the affects of divestment were unknown, we as a new curious activist group rose naturally and other universities have pursued such a path. This is the change that we must recognize to continue holding hope.

Sources:

Solnit, R. (2017). Grounds For Hope. Tikkun, 32(1), 30-39. doi:10.1215/08879982-3769066

What we used to think was  a problem over 6,000 miles away in Sub-Saharan Africa is now hitting us right at home. A large challenge we, as a western country, face is ignorance to the possibility that our environmental circumstances may resemble those in poorer countries. We like to think of ourselves as a westernized and industrialized leading super power that will solve the problems of the developing world that we encountered long in the past or never had to see.

The reality is that in our very own backyard, we are finding tropical parasites usually found in Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia. As a result of poor families homes in Lowndes County Alabama unable to afford proper septic systems and state governments’ inadequate support, raw sewage leaked in to yards creating pools of sewage beginning in 2001. These pools of contamination attract mosquitos and tapeworms that can carry different diseases (Gist.org). With rising temperatures due to climate change and increased rainfall, these pools have the ability to grow and pose increased threat to neighborhoods. This creates a perfect habitat for parasites, otherwise known as hookworms, to inhabit and breed. The hookworm infection plaguing Lownes County is just like many other cases, where the extreme poverty and poor sanitation allow for the growth of endemic infections.

Further devastating is the fact that suffering individuals are afraid of reporting such issues due to fear of arrest or criminal prosecution for open-piping sewage from their homes (The Guardian). Since they are unable to afford a septic tank, they have no other choice but to suffer and see the environmental threat grow in front of them. The lack of support and infrastructure provided by the government is an environmental injustice that is slowly gaining attention.

Catherine Flowers is making significant strides to solve this environmental injustice by helping build affordable septic systems (Gist.org). However Dr Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine in Houston, Texas suggests something of extreme importance that our country need accept to proceed further. He “warns against complacency and estimates as many as 12 million Americans  living with a poverty-related neglected tropical disease.” He notes that most of the world’s neglected diseases are actually in the G20 countries and that “the concept of global health needs to give way to a new paradigm: on the new map, Texas and the Gulf coast would be lit up as a hotspot” (Financial Times). His shift in reconsidering global health as an issue that hits us right at home is imperative for solving the environmental threats and injustices hitting our nation.

Photograph: Bob Miller from The Guardian

Previously, I looked at maps as a navigating medium. They make life simpler by laying out cities and towns making it easy to locate one’s destination. However, maps are more telling than this. In actuality, maps are a potential story telling platform. Constantly changing, they share the relationship between groups of people among spaces, connections between events, but most importantly they develop new perspectives on the world we live in. Drawing a map allows us to bring to life, the world we wish to see or examine critically. Therefore, we may create beautiful maps that educate new students on programs and buildings on a college campus or we create a map displaying a city’s gentrification to criticize public policy.

In the process of creating a map, one has the power to produce new social organizations and relationships between people. This results in new forms of solidarity because people can locate and connect themselves to others. For instance, by connecting the oral histories of people who were evicted from their homes, we not only identify areas of gentrification but unite the people suffering from such injustice. Amidst the alienation they suffer, those who were evicted can find unification and connectivity when sharing their stories. I found this highly surprising because the map can have three visible effects: political, educational, and emotional. It builds a political argument by localizing the areas of gentrification in communities. It educates society about where this is taking place and it unites those suffering from eviction or homelessness.

While published in 1971, Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals is ever so relevant to modern community organizing. While reading the prologue and chapter one, I had no idea that the book was written over 47 years ago. The tone and points made by Alinsky are highly perceptive, honest, and relatable to today.

Beginning in his introduction, he speaks about his audience. To a group of people trying to “make some sense out of their lives and out of this world.” A group of people that do not wish to follow the their parents’ path to find a well-paying job and end up with some type of addiction, a divorce, or the “disillusioned good life.” This seems like my generation. People deciding between the open directed path to finance, medicine, law, or consulting but also can steer left. Going left is affiliated with being radical. Becoming an activist and veering away from the structures of our system.

Further, Alinsky describes the exact circumstances we observe before us. Where “the young have seen their activists participatory democracy turn into its antithesis – nihilistic bombing and murder.” Whether it be the mass shootings taking place directed at innocent children attending academic institutions or good humans attending their church, or  larger global threats from ISIS or North Korea, the antithesis of a activist democracy surrounds us. It even spams to the undermining of our democracy by the Russian government in the 2017 Presidential election. Fighting for what is right and searching for meaning in our society is difficult when confronted with daily threats to freedom. With all this in the back of my head and on the front page of our popular news, it’s sensible that Alinsky’s words feel ever so prevalent.

His words of advice are empowering but hard to put into action. He suggests that the revolution we are waiting for will only come about after reformation. Asking for our revolution is asking for “the impossible in politics.” Instead of jumping 10 immediate steps forward to a foreign island, we must create a “bridge” to connect our old understandings and values to a new “way.” But how exactly do we create this reformation in a political climate so extreme? Robin Kirk noted that today’s political climate is so different due to the fact that there is so much to be done and people are enraged in a new way because of the extreme climate. She explains “extreme” as the immense division on several issues and little bi-partisanship. Alinsky’s bridge that we must create from the old to the new seems far too fetched. Perhaps multiple bridges must be constructed first between the divisions in our community.

His most compelling point that I hope to carry with me in our developing activism project is that the individual in a free democratic society who wants to see change happen must be willing to give up their own interests to see hope and freedom for others. In this way, we are fully accountable for lack of progress due to self interest.

While we cherish the Duke endowment for its commitment to provide new educational endeavors, more scholarship opportunities, pivotal research, and attracting highly acclaimed academic professionals, if we are not willing to exchange these interest momentarily to divest in big oil companies, then we fail to allow the change. This is change in our climate and the change needed to provide freedom to vulnerable populations exploited by foreign oil extraction.

Citations:

Alinsky, S. D. (1971). Prologue and The Purpose. In Rules for Radicals: A practical primer for realistic radicals (pp. Xiii-24). New York: Random House.

Helon Habila’s novel Oil on Water invites readers on the journey of two news reporters visiting the Niger Delta. Allowing us to  see the devastating environmental impacts of rich-oil companies and the suffering of the innocent villagers.

When considering why this work of fiction was weaved into the class curriculum, at the onset of the novel I presumed that we would focus on the reporters’ voluntary adventure into the Niger Delta as a form of activism. By observing the situation there and reporting the story to a broader audience across the Globe, I thought we would evaluate the relationship between journalism and activism.

Though this is one way to look at the novel, in our class discussion we evaluated who was innocent and who was guilty. After ruling out the government as guilty for accepting money from the British oil companies, the soldiers for killing innocent people, and the rich white people for investing in the big oil companies, the only people considered to be innocent were the reporters, the worshippers, the villagers, and the militants. The worshippers and villagers were innocent people forced to choose between becoming a soldier or wanderers after selling their land to the oil companies. While the militants seem guilty at face value, their act of kidnapping, tapping oil pipes, and using violence was an attempt to stand up for their environment and the Nigerian people. They like the villagers did not have a choice. They were neglected by their government and taking any action possible to save themselves.

Recognizing who is innocent and guilty helps us appreciate this novel’s contribution to our understanding of  activism. The story enlightens us to the villagers’ cause. When we, liberal westerners, think about big oil companies, our major concern is barring these industries to protect our environment and ourselves against climate change. We assume scientific reasoning and tell ourselves that increased burning of fossil fuels like coal and oil increase the concentration of CO2 in our atmosphere. We are quick to worry about the affects of CO2 on global temperatures, oceans, the arctic, and the list goes on.

However, this novel opens us up to the other side of the argument – where is this oil coming from. It sheds light on the exploitation of vulnerable populations by wealthy foreign oil companies, as seen similarly in Spider the Artist. The fact that the novel does not mention climate change forces us to consider that this is also a human rights abuse. We begin to consider how these peoples’ daily lives have been entirely altered. They are fighting for resources that were once abound and now contaminated by oil pollution. The farmers have lost their land. The fishermen have lost their catch. And they have all lost their water, shelter, and clean air. Overall, this novel adds to our study by helping us realize that environmental activism is not just a story about the environmental sciences but something much larger. A story about external greedy powers destroying villages, disrupting culture, and shifting power/social dynamics.

Martin Neimöller was a German anti-Nazi theologian and Lutheran pastor. At my Jewish day school, his poem about bystanders was a consistent theme weaved into our curriculum. There was a constant focus on civil disobedience and speaking out when there was wrong doing in the world. His writing lies on the wall of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum and reads:

This past December, I spent two weeks in South Africa, where I experienced their staunch water conservation efforts and learned about the environmental hazards threatening Kruger National Park. Something drew me in and struck with me here. I saw the effects right in front of me. When traveling through the park,  it took a while to come across an animal that was not a kudu or impala. There was nothing like the excitement I felt when we spotted a lion and its cub or a herd of grazing elephants. It was like a drop in my heart. Coming into contact with the wild all on my own. I was no longer in the man-made parks within New York City’s concrete jungle but face to face with a wild animal. When I learned about the wide scale rhino poaching threatening the rhino population of Kruger, it all made sense. Not only had I saw the void in the park but I actually felt their absence. Every time we went out on a drive, we would wait patiently for the rhino. Though, I did not get to experience the same excitement. This is what searching for endangered species is like.

Upon reading Linda Hogan’s novel, Power, I tried to understand Ama and the Taiga people’s fascination with the panther. My best attempt was relating it to my recent experience with the rhino while taking into consideration the Taiga people’s deeper spiritual connection. But in my attempt to best understand, I tried to relate my impatience and excitement to Ama. She had been searching for the panther her whole life and now it had come to her. But why then did she kill it?

Hunting, poaching, capturing an animal, you name the game-hunting practice, I will never understand it. When I saw the direct influences of the poachers that entered Kruger from the Mozambique boarder to poach rhinos and sell their horns for a living, I was very unsettled. Omishto’s original reaction to Ama’s actions was similar to mine. Bewildered and upset. How could she kill the innocent panther that was so important to her. “Oh Ama what have you gone and done,” as Omishto says (Hogan 67).  However, Hogan’s novel helped me to better understand how these practices can be intimately related to one’s religion and culture. Ama’s compassion for the animals and connection to her tribe sensitized me to the ways that hunting may be part of one’s religious traditions. The New York Times article regarding the court case of 1987 helped me to further differentiate between the practices of the Native American people and the poachers.

”if the white man had the same commitment to preserving wildlife as the Indians, there would be no endangered species.”

This was exactly it. The Florida panther is not endangered because the Taiga people have hunted it for thousands of years. In reality, the panther is on our endangered species list due to the construction of urban cities and infiltration of human beings in areas that once were home to the panther. Florida’s new shopping malls and highways are the cause of this danger. These are the costs of capitalism and a society that only wishes to see growth in its economy. This is true for the African poacher. Poor and helpless, he sacrifices his life entering into territories fenced in barbed wire. He is the product of a capitalist system that forces us to become wage-earners and exchange goods. Had it not been for his family, his government, and his society, he would not have to endanger the rhino.

Ama kills the panther when it is sick, old, and hungry. She preserves the integrity of her culture and willingly sacrifices herself for the her people. But her sacrifice is not like that of the poacher. She does not exchange the panther as a commodity. She uplifts his spirit to her people and follows the necessary rituals to save her nation from extinction. What the article makes clear on the surface level is that hunting and protecting the panther is part of the religious narrative of the  Native Americans, but the book supplements our understanding by exposing the nuances of this relationship and deep devotion. This type of “commitment” that Native Americans have is sufficient for them to hunt sustainably and follow their culture. While one may argue that killing animals will endanger the species, the Native Americans lived here long before us and sustained this lifestyle independently. It is the values within the capitalist system and behind modernization that lack this sensitivity and threaten the livelihood of the panther or just as equally, the black rhino. This is why Mr. Rogow refers to the hypothetical “if the white man had the same commitment.” The “white man’s” failing commitment is evident in the conflict between his values and actions like passing the Endangered Species Act. When passing this law, he fails to actually target the activity of illegal poachers, human pollution, and urban development. But instead he threatens the vitality of the Native American culture and their right to religious freedom.

Citations: