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THE WITNESSA Frontliner’s pavement perspective on protecting the North Pole
By Thomas McConville, Frontline San Jose
“The Arctic – that’s the one on top, right?”
“Exactly.”, I replied.
“And you guys are going to turn it into a park?”
“Well, a world park – like a global sanctuary; no rides or popcorn stands.”
“The people finally woke up” – and will no longer turn back to sleep. The phrase heard from the four corners of Brazil, this Monday, was the summary of what was seen everywhere: it was past midnight and thousands of people remained in the streets – and on the social networks – sharing emotions, images and memories of a day that has already become history in the country.
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Take a look at the world we live in. It is full of life, joys, and beauty, but you don’t need to look harder to see that there are injustices happening every day. Some may seem too great to fix, and others insignificant or unimportant, but all of these wrongs have major implications for each of our lives and affect us all. For me, learning about constant and increasing environmental destruction made me feel so infuriated and unsatisfied with my inability to help, so I decided to apply for the Greenpeace Summer Semester. For a little background information about me, I am studying at the Eastman School of Music to become a classical trombonist, so I was shocked and thrilled when I learned that I had been accepted into this program.
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Skipjack tuna and bycatch caught in the net of a purse seiner using fish aggregation devices (FADs)
Monday, June 10th – 9am: Nine Greenpeace Semester student activists and three staff loaded their bags for a week long trip to Pittsburgh. Our goal was to focus an international campaign at tuna company StarKist and its Korea-based parent company Dongwon to highlight their unsustainable fishing practices that are depleting tuna populations, killing off other marine wildlife including sharks, turtles, and sea birds, and have involved actual pirating.
While climbing into the van, I’ll admit that I felt very uncertain about how our trip would go, despite the hard work my classmates and I had put in to plan for the week. As part of the visuals team, my job was to be photographer and videographer of the whole experience and to compile photo petitions to StarKist headquarters in Pittsburgh and send them to our colleagues at Greenpeace in Korea who would use them against Dongwon. My realist side doubted the efficacy of such a short trip; coupled with the weather forecasts predicting 70% chance of thunderstorms, my reservations were justified.
Then came our results: 578 photo petitions and 650 signatures on our physical petition from the public, smashing our original goal of 400 of each!
Hundreds of photo petitions from the public get assembled to deliver to Pittsburgh-based tuna company StarKist to protest their destructive fishing methods.
Needless to say, my attitude took a drastic turn throughout the week. It’s been a long time since I felt such a strong sense of accomplishment, and knowing that our photos would reach a continent 7900 miles away was both mind-boggling and immensely empowering. I won’t say much else here, as I feel that the numbers speak for themselves. What I do want to add is this: from my experience going on the Pittsburgh campaign trip, I’ve learned that nothing will change unless we all actively choose to make ourselves heard. It’s okay to doubt, stumble, fail, reassess, and reassemble, as long as we’re not complacent—for that makes us complicit in the wrongs done against our environment today.
In the words of Oceans Campaigner Phil Kline, “Just go do it.”
Imagine you’re sitting at a table, playing a game of Russian roulette. Across from you is a five-chambered revolver, loaded with a single steel bullet. If you live, you win a stack of cash. Losing means your life. Would you play?
Big oil companies, like Shell and Exxon, want to play a similar game, with the same chance of losing everything. They’re not wagering their lives, though—they’re betting on the safety of our precious and finite environment. The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement (formerly the Minerals Management Service) estimates a one-in-five chance of a major spill occurring over the lifetime of activity in just one block of leases in the Arctic Ocean near Alaska. Risky, right? It’s common sense; why risk ruining a beautiful and crucial habitat for something as trivial as the three years’ worth of oil it would provide?
The effects of such a spill could be grave—possibly even worse than the BP Gulf Coast spill. Gushing oil would tarnish the lives of the people and animals who call the Arctic their home. If the well was not sealed fast enough (and with winter sea ice, it could take as much as six months for clean up crews to arrive on the scene), the oil could become trapped underneath winter ice, and flow in the waters below for up to two years.
Even worse, the big oil companies have yet to compose a rational plan for dealing with spilled oil. Part of Shell’s current response would be to burn leaking oil—seriously? A wise woodshop teacher once told me to measure twice and cut once. Shell is going in with no real plan– let’s hope they’re better at drilling than I am at cutting two-by-fours.
What’s most upsetting to me is the fact that oil companies like Shell are making dangerous decisions that will affect not only our generation, but those of the future. Children are so excited about animals like polar bears and foxes, and are so eager to learn about them.
I met a young boy while canvassing for Greenpeace who was so enthusiastic about tigers that he dragged his mother and sister over to talk to me.Telling him that human greed is endangering these creatures broke my heart. He smiled at me and tugged on his mother’s shirt. “We help them?” he asked her with wide eyes, before looking at me and asserting “We help them!” By the time that boy is an adult, we need to make sure there will still be tigers and polar bears for him to help.
The decision on drilling in the Arctic is simple: The risk factor is high, and the consequences are devastating. Is the US willing to risk the safety of the Arctic for three years’ worth of oil? Do you think that burning oil is a viable disaster plan?
Would you play Russian roulette with a five chambered revolver?
With all 105,000 cubic feet of air milked out of the airship envelope and packed neatly away in its trailer, the airship crew departed the mists and winds of Seattle for a 1,700 mile drive to Juneau, Alaska.
It might be hard to think of our floating, rainbowed airship as an in-your-face kind of tool for direct communication, but in the case of the North Pacific Fisheries Management Council, that is exactly what it was.
This past Saturday in a small baseball diamond, we began inflating the ship in the deep, windless afternoon. Locals on foot began to fill the diamond. People stopped their boats, parked their bikes, and pulled over in their cars to watch the A.E. Bates gently rise to life. As the ship left the ground, the crowed cheered with excitement and support. The words “Protect My Home” drifted into the channel and headed directly toward the council members who were having a party on one of the nearby rooftops. There, surrounded by snow kissed mountains and in the soft, long, Alaskan sunset the airship took the message directly to the council members and they had no choice but to look.
The entire team on the ground, from crew to campaigns, were on constant standby. With every move the council made, we were ready to respond. Our goal was to make sure that each member of the council understood our message and knew we weren’t going to go away. The council members would be reminded constantly of the need to protect to the canyons. Campaigners eloquently made the case for the Bering sea canyons inside the conference while the airship flew in the morning and evening, greeting the members when they woke and reminding them as they closed the day. When they picked up the local paper, there were photos and stories of the airship, advertisements about the importance of the canyons, and articles articulating our campaign. When they retreated to their hotel rooms, they were reminded yet again by the flyers that beckoned from the floors. When they sought distance from the public in the conference center, we met them there.
On one of their lunch breaks, council members were greeted on the lawn by a collection of activists representing multiple groups and holding a 26 ft. banner asking the Council not to fail the 100,000+ people demanding a healthy ocean and protection of their food source.
When they thought they could close themselves behind the doors of the convention hall, activists took the banner into the meeting room. They stood quietly and strong during the public comment session allowing the banner that wrapped around over half the room, speak for itself. The council had to acknowledge it.
We will never know for sure how much the ground team’s actions effected the final decisions that were made this past week, but what we do know undoubtedly that our presence was felt and that the council moved cautiously because of it. They could no longer chose to ignore the message, the communities, and the clear necessity to protect the Bering Sea Canyons.
Want to see what it looks like from inside the airship? Check out this awesome video of the gorgeous flights in Juneau.
Thanks everyone for the flexibility, creativity, and great work!
“Find out just what people will submit to and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong that will be imposed upon them.”
– Frederick Douglass, American ex-slave civil rights leader.
The citizens of Istanbul now appear in control of Gezi Park, protecting one of the last and most treasured green spaces in Istanbul from conversion to a shopping mall.
The protest, which began to save the park, became a rally for genuine democracy in Turkey. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government responded with police violence – beatings, pepper spray, water cannons, and tear gas – but could not stop the protests from spreading to over 70 Turkish cities, exposing Erdogan’s persecution of opposition and media censorship.
When governments turn to violence to bully their own citizens, the system breaks down when people resist with courage. The Gezi Park uprising has become a model of genuine democracy for the world, a line of defiance in the battle to preserve nature and democracy.
When governments over-react
Last fall, the Turkish government closed roads into Istanbul centre, and announced plans to convert Gezi Park to a shopping mall and military artillery barracks. When construction began in May, Taksim Solidarity activists blockaded bulldozers. Sırrı Süreyya Önder, a Peace & Democracy Party deputy, joined the blockade, invoking parliamentary immunity.
Erdogan dismissed protesters as “marginal extremists”. At dawn on 30 May, police raided the park with tear gas and water cannons. They drove about 1,000 citizens from the park, and then burned their tents and possessions.
Calls went out on social media, and 10,000 people arrived at Gezi Park. Police attacked again, injuring hundreds of citizens and three reporters from Reuters, the Hürriyet Daily News, and Birgün newspaper. Citizens opened their homes to injured protesters. By evening, 100,000 people had re-occupied the park. That night, the public occupied the historic Bosphorus Bridge that links Europe to Asia.
The uprising spread beyond Istanbul to Ankara, Izmir, and over 70 Turkish cities. Izmir police detained 29 people for sending Twitter messages. The Turkish Doctors’ Union reported 4,177 people injured during protests and two deaths.
On Tuesday, 4 June, Turkey’s Deputy Prime Minister Bülent Arınç apologised for police violence and met with opposition leader Önder, who called the uprising “historic” and announced that “the democratic process would start”. The following day, Arınç met with the original protest group platform, Taksim Solidarity, which delivered the public’s demands: Cancel the Gezi park demolition, release arrested citizens, ban tear gas, and allow free public assembly and free expression.
Solidarity
Sirin Bayram, a woman who has worked for Greenpeace, wrote to me from Istanbul about inspiring acts of public support: “A bus driver saw police and a water cannon behind him in the street, heading for Gezi Park. He stopped his bus and blocked them. We were proud of him, because, of course, he lost his job. At the courthouse in Istanbul, lawyers made a protest by clapping their hands. The government arrested over 75 lawyers, for clapping!”
Bayram described working at the park to collect support for the protesters. “A little boy came to the park with some rice his mother had cooked for his lunch. He said ‘My big sisters and brothers in the park need this more than me.’ He put the rice on the table and he left. This put tears on our faces and kept us strong.”
The Greenpeace office in Istanbul stands on Istiklal Street, leading to Gezi Park. Police officers confronted demonstrators with tear gas and water cannons directly below the office, which remained open night and day, providing shelter to injured protestors. Doctors and medics arrived to offer medical assistance.
On Saturday, 8 June, protesters witnessed an unprecedented expression of solidarity as Turkey’s rival football fans – from Fenerbahce, Galatasaray, Besiktas, and other sports clubs barred from watching matches together because of stadium violence – walked through Istanbul arm-in-arm, wearing each others’ team colours.
Censorship in Turkey
The citizens of Istanbul have now occupied Gezi Park and Taksim Square, staged music and political speakers, and insisted on a new era of genuine democracy in Turkey. Twenty-two year old protester Yesim Polat told Al Jazeera, “Prime Minister Erdogan thinks that he is a sultan. He thinks he can do whatever he wants.”
Turkey once represented a modern, secular state that offered religious freedom. Erdogan and his conservative Justice and Development Party (AKP) advocate a return to an Islamic state. Once elected in 2003, Erdogan began arresting opposition voices, Kurdish leaders, and journalists, and harassing private couples for kissing in public.
Mustafa Akyol, a columnist with the Hürriyet newspaper, told Al Jazeera that journalists are being arrested under a abuse of Turkey’s anti-terrorism law. “The great majority of the journalists in jail are people who wrote positive things about the PKK.”
In January 2013, Erdogan’s police arrested 11 journalists attending an opposition political party meeting, and sentenced five of them to jail, increasing the number of jailed journalists in Turkey to 75. Prior to Gezi Park, freedom of the media had virtually vanished in Turkey.
Parks and People
From Amsterdam’s Vondelpark and California’s People’s Park in the 1960s, to Prague’s Wenceslas Square and Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in 1989, to Cairo’s Tahrir Square in 2011, protecting public parks has provided the backdrop for democracy around the world.
In 1970, a group of citizens in Vancouver, Canada – the “Don’t Make a Wave Committee,” which later became Greenpeace – rallied to save a park entrance in Vancouver. At that time, the Four Seasons Hotel chain announced a plan to construct six towers at the entrance to Vancouver’s magnificent, 400 hectare Stanley Park, a waterfront meadow that opened onto a lagoon, where swans nested in the bulrushes and families gathered for picnics.
Two of the Don’t Make a Wave group, Greenpeace co-founders Rod Marining and Bob Hunter, met to make a plan. Hunter, a newspaper columnist, had described his “mindbomb” theory, which became a key Greenpeace strategy. “The holistic revolution won’t be like storming the Bastille,” Hunter would say, “but a storming of the mind.” Hunter believed that campaigns to change in the world should create images that could change people’s way of thinking. Today, we call this a “meme” but in 1970, this was a “mindbomb,” an image that would travel on the global media and shift public perception.
In May 1971, during a light spring snow, Marining and his allies occupied the park entrance, pitched tents on the land, and put up signs calling the encampment “All Season’s Park”.The camp included indigenous activists, Québéquois separatists, hippies, and several early Greenpeace founders. Ben Metcalfe, the first Greenpeace media officer, organised a group of citizens to bring food and wine to the occupiers. Nurseries in Vancouver donated plants. Protesters laid sod over construction roads and planted trees. Images of “All Seasons Park”, with families in tents in the snow, became one of the earliest Greenpeace mindbombs.
The story appeared on Vancouver television and in newspapers. Occupiers demanded a public referendum, and Vancouver citizens voted 56% in favour of keeping the park entrance, but the by-law required 60% for approval. The stand-off continued until the wealthy father of a protestor offered to purchase the property for $4m. The entrance to Stanley Park was saved, and remains a part of Vancouver and Greenpeace heritage to this day.
Gezi Park and the World
Today, Gezi Park has become a mindbomb for the world. The protest over a park became a referendum for democracy. “We are here for our freedom,” Nihan Dinc, a 26-year-old publicist, told Al Jazeera. “We are here for a space to breathe.”
Journalist Pepi Escobar explains in an Asia Times story why Gezi Park is significant beyond Turkey. Escobar describes the Syria revolution as a “proxy war” between NATO and a new Russia/China alliance. Turkey sits at a strategic point between Europe and Asia, where NATO and western oil companies want a pipeline from the United Arab Emirates, through Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Turkey, into Europe. Escobar explains that NATO and the US want Turkey to support their military efforts in Syria to win the pipeline war. However, “Turkey has been plunged into the … Gezi/Down-with-the-Dictator maelstrom,” Escobar writes, “and the last thing an embattled Erdogan will be thinking about is to further empower a bunch of ‘rebel’ losers.”
But Gezi Park is important for another reason: The people of Istanbul have shown the world that citizens can stand up to military and police violence with peaceful solidarity.
This has been a big week for the oceans! After much speculation, the North Pacific Fisheries Management Council (NPFMC) voted unanimously to begin the process of conserving and protecting the Bering Sea Canyons in Alaska. The canyons are home to many different species, such as orca and humpback whales, which have been unfortunate victims of excessive industrial fishing that has been destroying their natural habitat and depriving them of food for many years.
Thanks to the 77,000 of you that sent messages to the council, urging them to take action, the Bering Sea is well on its way to protection! This favorable result should serve as a message to the world that if we stand together, collectively, we do have the power to make a difference!
While much work remains in order to ensure that the whales, sea lions, and other inhabitants of the Bering Sea Canyons obtain the protection that they deserve, this definitely is something to feel good about on this Friday!
Learn more here. http://bit.ly/13Xpleg
Shenanigans at the front door of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce yesterday reveal that the Chamber has dropped its lawsuit against the Yes Men, the activist duo famous for their elaborate prime-time pranks against Dow Chemical, Chevron, the World Trade Organization, and other giant entities known for putting their profit margins before people and the planet.
The Yes Men went to the Chamber yesterday morning in attempts to convince the business front group not to drop the lawsuit. Here’s some footage of the announcement and confusion over who does and doesn’t work for the Chamber:
That’s right. The Yes Men want to be sued by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. According to their press release:
“Just as their case against us was finally heating up again, the Chamber decided to drop it,” said former defendant Andy Bichlbaum of the Yes Men. “The Chamber knew this was our chance to challenge their silly claims and, since they claimed we had ‘damaged’ them, investigate the details of their finances through the discovery process. It’s the height of rudeness to deprive us of this great opportunity.”
“The Chamber’s lawsuit represented the only time in 17 years that anyone has been stupid enough to sue us,” said former defendant Mike Bonanno. Continue reading
The NSA’s data center is being constructed in Utah, where 84 % of the electricity comes from coal.
Of the 86 groups that formed the Stop Watching Us coalition to protest the NSA’s illegal spying on people’s Internet use, you might wonder why Greenpeace was on the list. We had a bunch of good reasons to join, not least of all the fact that we have a long history as the target of illegal espionage, often at the hands of corporations, though the government has spied on us its fair share as well.
We know firsthand how quickly government agencies can tumble down a slippery slope, using tools that were ostensibly meant to protect people as a political weapon instead. We also recognize an act of heroic civil disobedience when we see one, and Edward Snowden deserves all of our praise for his patriotic action to protect people’s rights despite great personal risk.
But there is a much more important reason why we have taken a stand against the NSA’s spying, and why you should consider doing the same:
A free, open Internet may be our last best hope to save the planet.
Like all tools, the Internet is not inherently good or evil – its value is determined by the intentions of its users.
Thankfully, an incredible number of people are currently using the Internet to make the world a better place. From the Arab Spring, to Gezi, to Greenpeace activists punking oil companies’ propaganda, people are using the Internet as a powerful tool to organize democratically and fight for their rights.
But corporations and governments are slow to cede power, and they will fight back using the exact same technology.
That is one of the greatest threats posed by the NSA’s illegal spying program. The idea that the NSA is monitoring so many people’s communication is deeply unnerving; the idea that they could use the program to entrench governments’ political power is downright terrifying.
The fight over the future of the Internet extends into the non-virtual world as well. Greenpeace has been calling for an Internet powered by clean energy, so that as it continues to grow, it can simultaneously help drive the clean energy revolution we desperately need to slow down climate change.
And what kind of power is fueling the data center that Big Brother is building to store our illegally collected Facebook posts and phone calls? Coal, of course! The data center, which is estimated to draw 65 megawatts of electricity, as much as some towns, is being constructed in Utah, where 84 % of the electricity comes from coal, according to Energy Information Administration data.
Illegal government spying, powered by the fuel most responsible for climate change, represents a special kind of darkness, an absurdly apt metaphor for the worst kind of Internet we could imagine.
We will keep working to build an Internet that is free, open and green. Please join us, starting by adding your name to the over 100,000 people and organizations who have already signed the Stop Watching Us petition.