Yes! Magazine

In the video series "Kumail Tours Portland," Kumail Nanjiani takes a look at the real city behind the hit comedy TV show. In the sketch above, he visited a tiny house, had a look around, and asked the owner a few questions.

"I like the idea of seeing how simple, how small it could be," the owner says.

The idea of tiny houses have long been a favorite in the pages of YES!, where we've talked about them as a way to live more cheaply, sustainably, and simply. But how would the tiny house movement come off on TV?

Pretty well, it turns out. Kumail gets a few laughs at the owner’s expense and the scene in general is “very Portland,” but the tiny house itself looks clean, beautiful, and livable.

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• Real Homes: Small, Frugal, and Green
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Workers in the restaurant industry are among the most likely to be paid minimum wage. Photo by Kymberly Janisch.

One of the most compelling proposals to come out of this year's State of the Union Address was President Obama's call to boost the federal minimum wage to $9 per hour—up from the current minimum of $7.25 per hour—and to tie future increases to the cost of living. To create public awareness about the need for the raise, officials from the U.S. Department of Labor have been touring the country to meet with working people who are trying to live on the current minimum.

Mary Beth Maxwell, acting deputy administrator of the U.S. Department of Labor's Wage and Hour Division. Photo by Jobs with Justice.

Prominent in this effort has been Mary Beth Maxwell, the acting deputy administrator of the department's Wage and Hour Division. Having previously served as the founding director of American Rights at Work and as a top organizer for Jobs With Justice, Maxwell was one of the more well-known social movement leaders to join the administration. In recent years, her department has hired hundreds more investigators than were previously being deployed. As a result, Maxwell explains, "just this past year, we got $280 million in back wages for workers, the highest in the history of the Wage and Hour division."

I recently spoke with Maxwell about the drive to raise the minimum wage, what she has learned from her tour among low-wage workers, and why the timing is right.

Amy Dean: As you’ve been criss-crossing the country and engaging in conversations with people working at the minimum wage, have you noticed trends among those facing wage stagnation?

Mary Beth Maxwell: It’s been an incredibly humbling and inspiring experience to be part of these roundtables. I’ve been to Pittsburgh and San Antonio and Houston and Minneapolis and Gary, Ind. In each city, we’ve gathered a diverse group of workers that are working at or near the minimum wage. They’re white; they’re African American; they’re Latino. They’re women and they’re men. Many of them are working parents.

“Some of them have been moved to tears because they want to be able to support their families with their work.”

One of the myths in our country is that minimum wage workers are just teenagers in the suburbs earning extra pocket money. That’s not who I’ve been seeing at these minimum wage roundtables. I’ve been seeing and hearing stories of people who are working very, very hard. They are proud of the work they do, and they are frustrated. Some of them have been moved to tears because they want to be able to support their families with their work, with their wages. They don’t want to have to go for programs or supplements. They say, “I work hard, and I should be able to support my kids with what I earn.” It’s a matter of pride and dignity for people.

It's also been powerful for me when we have asked the question, "If we get this raise to $9 an hour, what would you do with that extra $70 in your paycheck each week?" One woman in San Antonio said, "I would buy fresh vegetables for my boys, so that it’s not just rice and beans and potatoes every night." Another woman said, "I would go to the dentist, because I haven’t been taking care of myself." Many people said they would buy medicine for themselves that they haven't been taking. It's the basics that people need.

One woman in Houston said to me, "I would go to the grocery store and buy a pack of hamburger, and spaghetti noodles, and sauce, so I could cook them all that night for my kids and not have to choose which of those things I would buy to feed them." People do not have enough money to cover the basics, even people who are working full-time or working multiple jobs.

“The minimum wage has just not kept pace with cost of living for people in this country.”

Amy: Politics is often about timing. Why is it important to increase the minimum wage now?

Mary Beth: We all know that, in these hard economic times, a lot of people are really hurting. It's just wrong that in this wealthiest of nations, someone could work full-time at minimum wage and make only $14,500 a year. If you have a couple of kids, that means you’re living in poverty. So I think the moment is exactly right for us to say it’s time to do something about that. It’s part of the basic bargain in America—that no matter who you are, no matter where you come from, you work hard and play by the rules, you should be able to have a decent job and support yourself and your family. Right now, the minimum wage has just not kept pace with cost of living for people in this country.

Amy: Over the past two decades, campaigns have blossomed across the country advocating different ways to increase local minimum wages or to establish living wage laws. To what extent do those efforts support change at the federal level?

Mary Beth: I think the work at the state, county, and municipal levels has been incredibly important. Since 2009, the last time that the federal minimum wage was raised, 19 states and the District of Columbia have gone on their own and raised their minimum wages. That speaks to the broad public support for this. Over 70 percent of Americans support the notion of raising the federal minimum wage. I think all of the work that has gone into those campaigns in states and cities and counties has meant not only concrete victories for working people—putting more money in their pockets—but also building a stronger movement around the need to raise wages and reward work.

“It's just wrong that in this wealthiest of nations, someone could work full-time and make only $14,500 a year.”

Amy: We know from experience that employers who oppose minimum wage or living wage increases always argue that jobs will move away, or that they will have to lay people off if the raises pass. How are you inoculating against those arguments this time around?

Mary Beth: As you correctly say, they’re really the same arguments that get trotted out every time we have a debate about raising the minimum wage. The good news is that the economic research has, over and over again, disputed their claims. Raising the minimum wage doesn’t have a negative impact on job growth.

The other piece, I think, is that this is good for our economy. When you put money in the pockets of working people, they spend it. They spend it on groceries, on gas, on shoes for their kids to go to school. And consumer spending has always been an engine of growth in the American economy. So it’s more than the idea that this doesn’t hurt job growth; it is good for the economic recovery to raise the minimum wage.

Amy Dean is a fellow of The Century Foundation and principal of ABD Ventures, LLC, an organizational development consulting firm that works to develop new and innovative organizing strategies for social change organizations. Dean is co-author, with David Reynolds, of A New New Deal: How Regional Activism Will Reshape the American Labor Movement. Dean has worked for nearly two decades at the cross section of labor and community based organizations linking policy and research with action and advocacy. You can follow Amy on twitter @amybdean, or she can be reached via www.amybdean.com .

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A group of Rarámuri Indians from Bocoyna Municipality, who marched into the governor’s palace in 2008 to demand that genetically modified corn not contaminate their native seeds. Photo by David Lauer.

Chewing on a mouthful of locally grown lettuce, I wondered if the claims I’d heard about the global food-justice movement were true. Was there a line to follow, however crooked, between my purchase of these greens, land reform in Brazil and opposition to genetically modified seeds in California. Or was it all just empty calories?

Reading about how people transform the way they farm and eat makes you want to cook up your own plans with your neighbors.

As a somewhat conscientious consumer and occasional Taco Bell boycotter, I’ve hoped that the movement was real. But it hasn't always been easy to perceive the connection between marching for improved farmworker rights, signing a petition against factory feedlots, and cooking up beets from a CSA (that is, community supported agriculture, which usually comes in the form a box of assorted veggies delivered to people who contribute to a local farm’s financial well-being).

Those connections form a tight weave in the new book, Harvesting Justice: Transforming Food, Land, and Agriculture in the Americas. Using “food sovereignty” as the secret sauce, the book sautés the individual ingredients of sister movements into a coherent, flavorful whole.

Young Rarámuri women select corn for next year´s seed after a farmer-to-farmer workshop on seed selection in the community of Rekusachi, Chihuahua. Photo by David Lauer.

The book was created for the U.S. Food Sovereignty Alliance—a network of organizations allied with La Via Campesina, which advocates for culturally appropriate (think tortillas in Mexico instead of bread), ecologically sound (no GMOs), and small-farmer friendly food systems.

The book’s authors, Tory Field and Beverly Bell, do a lot more with food than just write about it. Field is a farmer who co-manages the Next Barn Over Farm, a CSA program in western Massachusetts. Bell has worked for decades with small farmer organizations in Haiti, including those who set fire to agricultural aid after the 2010 earthquake. The farmers didn't see the donated seeds as aid, but as a Monsanto “trojan horse” undermining their control over their own food.

Both authors are also members of Other Worlds, an organization that educates the public about citizen movements and builds community alternatives to corporate globalization. Introducing us to farmers speaking in their own voices, they describe how fighting the dominance of agribusiness and relocalizing the food system are indeed two sides of the same coin.

The book merges five years of field research and interviews, and describes more than 100 case studies of advocacy campaigns and alternative food systems in the United States and around the world. The authors interview New Mexican farmer and teacher Miguel Santistevan, who insists that “We don’t like the way the food system treats the earth and its negative health effects on the people, [and] we are working to actualize an alternative.”

They introduce us to Rosnel Jean-Baptiste of Heads Together Small Peasant Farmers of Haiti (Tèt Kole Ti Peyizan Ayisyen), who says, “It’s not houses that are going to rebuild Haiti, it’s investing in the agriculture sector.”

And they encourage consumer action through the words of Ben Burkett, president of the National Family Farm Coaltion. “No matter what us farmers plant, the consumer’s got to change the system, ” Burkett says. “As long as they don’t complain, there’s no need even talking about it. The marketplace dictates.”

A group of Haitian peasants meets to discuss strategies for rebuilding agriculture after the earthquake of 2010. Photo by Roberto (Bear) Guerra.

Designed for use as an organizing tool

Accompanying the book is a curriculum of teaching exercises called "Sowing Seeds," intended for use in community and academic settings. The curriculum is dizzyingly comprehensive, a kind of “best of” in food systems education culled from sister organizations.

The book connects the dots between community groups doing related work and breaks up any sense of going it alone.

Have you ever wondered how many tons of tomatoes a picker needs to pick each day to earn minimum wage, or what the salary of David Novak—the CEO of the company that owns Taco Bell—would add up to in tons of tomatoes at the same rate? It’s all in here. Consumer, producer, and retailer perspectives are all explored through engaging exercises. Suggested workshop formats may come in handy if you are an educator or organizer.

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You may want to nudge your local bookseller to carry Harvesting Justice. I'm guessing they won't be sorry. It’s not only highly readable but may catalyze actions such as getting local food into school lunches. The stunning photos serve up inspiration to get off your duff and transform the local food system.

Because it provides that kind of inspiration, this is the kind of book that your local food co-op, farmer’s market, or anti-hunger organization might consider using as a study guide. It can help connect the dots between community groups doing related work and break up any sense of going it alone. The appendix fills nearly fifteen pages, introducing us to groups like the Food Chain Workers Alliance, First Nations Native Agriculture and Food Systems Initiative, and the Honduran Garifuna organization. While these organizations are scattered around the planet, they form the foundation of a localized, alternative food system.

Reading about how people transform the way they farm and eat makes you want to reach for a big soup pot, cut up some onions, and cook up your own plans with your neighbors. Harvesting Justice gives you more than the recommended dose of civic engagement.

Daniel Moss wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. As a consultant, Daniel works with communities and organizations around the world to advance democratic and sustainable stewardship of our shared commons.

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Pope Francis waves to crowds as he arrives to his inauguration mass in St. Peter's Square at the Vatican. Photo by Christus Vincit.

As the Catholic Church enters a new era of leadership under Pope Francis I, religious organizations around the world have congratulated and welcomed the new pope, hoping for a new era of interfaith cooperation. Several were willing to offer advice to both Pope Francis and the Catholic faithful that, if followed, could let Catholics, Muslims, Jews, and others better work together for a more peaceful world.

Pope Francis follows one of the most conservative and contentious popes in recent memory in respect to interfaith relations, and he may have his work cut out for him restoring the trust and mutual respect compromised by Pope Benedict XVI’s approach toward Judaism, Islam, and Native American religions.

In 2006, Benedict gave a lecture at the University of Regensburg in which he quoted a 14th century Byzantine Emperor, saying, “Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.” Benedict later explained the quote was for the purposes of the lecture and not his personal opinion. In 2007, Benedict lifted restrictions on the Tridentine Mass—a Latin liturgy banned by the Second Vatican Council that calls in part for the conversion of Jews to Christianity and an end to what it calls Jewish spiritual “blindness.” Also in 2007, Benedict claimed in an address to the Brazilian people that the Native Americans “silently longed” for Christianity, causing another storm of indignation and disappointment.

Pope Francis follows one of the most conservative and contentious popes in recent memory.

“Pope Francis can certainly repair the damage,” said Mike Ghouse, a spokesperson for the World Muslim Congress in Dallas, Texas. By distancing the modern church from the destructive closed-mindedness of the past and admitting wrongs “in the humility of Jesus,” Francis can help restore the relationship between Christians and Muslims, according to Ghouse.

Already, Pope Francis has displayed such humility. Last Thursday, he visited a jail in Rome where he washed the feet of prisoners, including a female Muslim convict. This marks a notable break with tradition, as Muslims are not typically included in clerical foot-washing ceremonies.

As far as Ghouse is concerned, both Christianity and Islam “focus on serving mankind, [and] treating others as you want to be treated” regardless of theological differences, and any violent conflict between the two is “politics” as a “byproduct of fear and insecurity.”

Ghouse, also president of the Foundation for Pluralism, believes the pope has the power to bring faiths together in order to achieve practical goals as well.

“Pope Francis can call on Muslims, Christians, Hindus, Jews, Sikhs, Buddhists, atheists, and others to jointly serve,” Ghouse said. “Eventually the feeling of doing good things will minimize the conflicts to the back burner, and people will learn to respect the otherness of others without having to agree.”

Pope Francis might be especially suited to changing education and practice, thanks to his career with the Jesuit clerical order

The Hindu American Foundation represents an inherently pluralistic faith and hopes that Pope Francis will reaffirm the church’s past commitments to respecting varieties of doctrine and celebrating similar values.

“Foundation leaders expressed hope that the Catholic Church, under Pope Francis I, as he will be called, will respect and privilege pluralism and interfaith relations, based on earlier efforts with Nostra Aetate,” the foundation said in a press release.

The Nostra Aetate is a proclamation, made by Pope Paul VI in 1965, that defines the Catholic Church’s relationship with non-Catholic religions. “[The church] considers above all in this declaration what men have in common and what draws them to fellowship,” the Nostra Aetate says. It continues:

The Catholic Church rejects nothing that is true and holy in [non-Catholic religions]. She regards with sincere reverence those ways of conduct and of life, those precepts and teachings which, though differing in many aspects from the ones she holds and sets forth, nonetheless often reflect a ray of that Truth which enlightens all men.

Despite this official recognition of truth in other faiths, the Hindu American Foundation is concerned the Nostra Aetate doesn’t go far enough. According to Padma Kuppa, a member of the foundation’s board of directors, Catholicism as a whole needs to better understand religious pluralism and the effect evangelism has on pluralistic faiths if Catholics are to mend damaged relationships.

“Whenever a faith has a mission of conversion, that’s something that needs to be examined,” Kuppa said, referring to what she called “predatory proselytizing”—everything from social pressure to conform to forceful conversions throughout Western history—on the part of Catholics. Kuppa encouraged the church and its leaders to be conscious of the impact these practices had and have on non-Catholics throughout the world.

“People will learn to respect the otherness of others without having to agree.”

The American Jewish Committee, an organization devoted to global Jewish advocacy, is confident in Pope Francis’ ability to strengthen interfaith dialogue and collaboration, especially with the Jewish faith and community. “There has never been a pope who has had so much personal experience, engagement, and involvement with a contemporary Jewish community as Pope Francis,” said Rabbi David Rosen, the International Director of Interreligious Affairs for the committee and one of few non-Catholics to be awarded the title of Papal Knight. Considering the new pope’s immediate gestures of goodwill to Jewish and other faith communities, including letters and invitations to inaugural ceremonies, Rosen finds it easy to be confident in strengthening Catholic-Jewish relations.

When it comes to any “unfinished business” between the faiths, Rosen said, “The major challenge is an educational challenge.” Despite a massive shift in church culture over the past several decades, from discriminating against Jews to embracing Judaism as the theological root of Christianity, “there are many places in the world where…Jews do not appear on the Catholic ‘radar screen’ and places where even bishops don’t know the content of the Nostra Aetate,” Rosen said. Pope Francis’ decades working with Jewish communities could provide a greater shift toward universal Catholic understanding of Judaism.

Pope Francis might be especially suited to changing education and practice within the wide variety of Catholic faithful, thanks to his career with the Jesuit clerical order, a catholic order known for their 16th to 18th century evangelism in Asia and the Americas. “The Jesuits had some issues with the Vatican over questions of local adaptation of Catholic rites,” said Dr. Jose Bento da Silva, a professor at Warwick University and author of the upcoming book The Government of the Society of Jesus.

“Pope Francis I is not only a former member of an organization that knows several practices need to be adapted; he himself is quite a multinational figure.” Francis was born to Italian parents in Argentina, where he was raised and served as Bishop Jorge Mario Bergoglio before being elected pope.

Regardless of past tensions between the Catholic Church and other faiths, all agree that “what’s done is done,” Kuppa said. “What we need to do is focus on the future.”

Chris Francis wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Chris is a recent graduate from Illinois Wesleyan University where he studied English literature and religion while working as managing editor and editor-in-chief of IWU’s student newspaper, The Argus.

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This article originally appeared on wagingnonviolence.org

Community members in Far Rockaway gather for one of the early meetings about cooperatives. Photo by WNV / Peter Rugh.

Three and a half months ago, the walls upstairs at the Church of the Prophecy in Far Rockaway, a low-income coastal neighborhood of New York City, were covered with maps of where help was most needed. The church was a hub for the Occupy Sandy relief effort after Hurricane Sandy. Now, nearly five months after the hurricane struck, the maps have been replaced by posters extolling the virtues of collective struggle and art made by neighborhood children enrolled in Occupy Sandy’s twice-weekly after-school program.

Worker-run enterprises have a history of flourishing in environments of economic distress or political upheaval.

“The kids missed a month and a half of school,” explained Luis Casco, a member of the church’s congregation who pulled strings to help move Occupy into Far Rockaway. The after-school program was, in part, his brainchild. “We figured we’d start helping the kids and we could win over their parents. Then we could actually start bigger projects,” he said.

One of those bigger projects is a worker-run cooperative initiative, organized by Occupy Sandy and supported by the Working World, an organization that specializes in incubating collectively owned businesses.

The initiative is well suited to Far Rockaway because worker-run enterprises have a history of flourishing in environments of economic distress or political upheaval. In 2001, when Argentina defaulted on its international loans and the country’s ownership class fled, Argentines took over abandoned factories and established networks of producers and distributors. In Venezuela, worker-run cooperatives were at the heart of the vision for 21st-century socialism, and Hugo Chavez’s administration helped create tens of thousands of collectively owned businesses over the last 14 years. Most notably, Spanish workers in the Basque region created the Mondragon Corporation, the world’s largest federation of cooperatives, during the Franco dictatorship in the 1950s. Today more than 250 enterprises operate under the Mondragon banner, and the federation, which spans 77 countries and employs 83,000 workers, has been widely praised.

“Collective approach pays big dividends,” read a headline about Mondragon in The Financial Times last year, while The New York Times noted the “use of workers’ share capital and loans” has enabled the federation to remain stable through vacillations in global markets, including the ongoing financial crisis.

Starting from scratch

While Mondragon shows what is possible down the line, Far Rockaway residents are at the very beginning of the process. At one of the crowded early meetings of the cooperative initiative, children and adults buzzed about with disposable plates of food in their hands, fraternizing as extra folding chairs were arranged. Several parents whose children attended the after-school program arrived, bringing their friends and neighbors along. Most were Spanish-speaking immigrants who, having spent their lives working for someone else, were eager to learn more about cooperatives.

Many in Far Rockaway lost their jobs when Hurricane Sandy rendered commutes impossible for flooded local businesses. For those without U.S. work papers, finding new employment has been difficult.

“It’s really hard to find a new job when you don’t have papers,” Casco explained. “Their homes were destroyed, they don’t have the resources to go to welfare and FEMA ain’t helping them.” Others, such as Olga Lezama, managed to keep their jobs after the storm, but the prospect of holding on to the profits of their labor has piqued their interest. Lezama currently works as an upholsterer for a high-end furniture company. By her calculations, her boss makes approximately $500 every hour off the furniture that she and her co-workers upholster, while she earns roughly $100 a day.

“It hurts my feelings and my pockets,” she said. “My job and my efforts and my everything goes to them.”

Luis Casco, a resident of Far Rockaway, has been one of the main organizers of community initiatives after Hurricane Sandy. Photo by WNV / Peter Rugh.

By her side was her husband, Carlos Lezama, a carpenter who specializes in cabinets. The pair hope to work with others in the community to form a home-design cooperative, a service in high demand after the storm, which ruined the ground floors of most of the region’s low-lying bungalows.

“We go to stores and buy cheap furniture, cabinets and stuff, and we’re wasting our money,” Lezama said. “In two months, the cabinet is no good. So we have go buy it again. Our people deserve good stuff.”

Workers in control

Occupy Sandy has allocated $60,000 of the $900,000 it raised in the initial flood of generosity following the storm toward the formation of cooperatives, an initiative they hope will spread across storm-affected areas if it proves successful in Far Rockaway. The Working World, an organization that provides zero-debt micro-finance loans to new cooperatives, has offered to provide monetary support, but for now the organization is mostly lending advice and training.

At one of the early meetings, Brandon Martin, the Working World’s founder, showed the crowd a slideshow of other projects the organization has helped launch. Images of a beekeepers’ cooperative in the countryside of Nicaragua and a shoe factory in Buenos Aires glowed on the wall behind Martin as he outlined the benefits of workers sharing resources and making decisions democratically.

Are there limits to what these businesses can achieve while embedded in a broader economic framework of competition?

“A cooperative is workers controlling capital, instead of capital controlling workers,” said Martin. “It’s about reorganizing the economy around who’s really in control.”

The Working World finances itself by collecting a small percentage of the profits that member collectives generate, money that the organization reinvests in establishing new enterprises. Martin explained that the idea originated in ancient Sumeria, where the word for "interest" was the same as the word for "calf."

“If the cow I lent you has babies,” explained Martin, “I loaned you my cow, so I can have some of the babies. That would be the interest.”

But if the cow was sterile, the Sumerians didn’t collect interest. The same works for Working World’s loans today. The organization only collects once a cooperative generates a steady profit, a model that avoids forcing people into debt if their business fails.

Interest grows

The Sumerians, for their part, eventually altered their lending practices such that they collected interest regardless of the outcome. The legacy of that shift is still with us today; few in Far Rockaway can call their surroundings their own. Walk through the neighborhood in the middle of a business day and you’ll see iron gratings pulled down over storefronts and plywood covering the windows of large shopping complexes. Those stores that are open often bear the insignias of chain outlets that carry money out of the neighborhood and into the coffers of large corporations. Worker-run cooperatives, in contrast, could offer a way for community members to sell the products of their labor without selling their labor itself—a shift that would keep capital within the community and cash in the pockets of workers.

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There is obvious enthusiasm in the neighborhood for worker-run enterprises. But are there limits to what these businesses can achieve while embedded in a broader economic framework of competition and exploitation? And does the focus on cooperatives represent a shift in direction for Occupy, one that veers away from a direct fight for systemic transformation?

At the following cooperative meeting a week later, the crowd had grown. People discussed plans for a scrap metal business and a cleaning-workers’ collective. One man pulled a citizens’ band radio out of his winter coat, explaining that drivers in the taxi cooperative he hoped to form could use it to communicate. He’d been doing research; nine other drivers were needed to secure an operating license from the city.

“We can’t fight the city,” one Occupy Sandy organizer confided. “But we can build co-ops.”

Building an alternative

Richard Wolff, professor of economics at the New School and author of Democracy at Work, a study of cooperative businesses, argues that forming cooperatives can be the first step in enacting a sweeping social and economic shift. Wolff envisions a transformation, similar to the social shift from feudalism to capitalism, in which cooperatives replace corporations and goods are distributed through a democratically planned economy.

The cooperatives that Wolff talks about, and the ones that Occupy Sandy is aiming to establish, are more accurately known as worker self-directed enterprises: businesses that organize democratically collective ownership at the point of production.

“When the workers get together and decide how to distribute the income in such an enterprise, would they give the CEO $25 million in stock bonuses while everybody else can barely get by?” Wolff asks rhetorically.

He stresses the difference between the productive and distributive side of economies, explaining that worker-run cooperatives are the often-overlooked prerequisite for achieving an egalitarian distribution of wealth and resources. “There is the question of what exactly an alternative to capitalism is,” he explains. “I’ve stressed worker-self-directed enterprises as a different way of organizing production.”

On the other hand are markets, which distribute the fruits of production. Wolff believes that the mistake of many 20th-century socialists was to imagine that the elimination of markets would create social egalitarianism, even though production had not yet been reorganized into a democratic model.

Given the pull between the productive and distributive side of economies, cooperatives must form networks to survive. Collaboration between networked enterprises allows these businesses to curb market pressures and, if the network manages to spread, to gain political power.

As Brandon Martin emphasizes, also, workers in new cooperatives must labor long hours to meet production quotas, just like with any other business, since their enterprise still has to compete for a market share. “Can one cooperative change that?” asks Martin. “No. But a cooperative economy might.”

Olga Lazema, however, isn’t thinking about the theoretical potential for cooperatives to challenge capitalism. She’s imagining the positive possibilities for her own neighborhood.

“A lot of people, their houses went like nothing,” she said, referring to Sandy’s destruction. “They have nothing. We could go there, build a small kitchen or whatever they need. Why not?”

Peter Rugh wrote this article for WagingNonviolence, where it originally appeared. Peter is a writer and activist based in Brooklyn, New York.

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Photo courtesy of IITA.

Janisse Ray celebrates the local, organic food movement but fears we’re forgetting something elemental: the seeds. According to Ray, what is happening with our seeds is not pretty. Ninety-four percent of vintage open-pollinated fruit and vegetable varieties have vanished over the last century.

The Seed Underground: A Growing Revolution to Save Food
by Janisse Ray
Chelsea Green, $17.95, 240 pages

Ray begins The Seed Underground: A Growing Revolution to Save Food by explaining how we lost our seeds. Feeding ourselves has always been a burden for humans, she explains. “So when somebody came along and said, ‘I’ll do that cultivating for you. I’ll save the seeds. You do something else,’ most of us jumped at the chance to be free.”

But, according to Ray, when the dwindling number of farmers who stayed on the land gave up on saving seeds and embraced hybridization, genetically modified organisms, and seed patents in order to make money, we became slaves to multinational corporations like Monsanto and Syngenta, which now control our food supply.

In 2007, 10 companies owned 67 percent of the seed market. These corporations control the playing field, because they influence the government regulators. They’ve been known to snatch up little-known varieties of seeds, patent them, and demand royalties from farmers whose ancestors have grown the crops for centuries. The result is that our seeds are disappearing, and we miss out on the exquisite tastes and smells of an enormous variety of fruits and vegetables. More alarmingly, “we strip our crops of the ability to adapt to change and we put the entire food supply at risk,” Ray writes. “The more varieties we lose, the closer we slide to the tipping point of disaster.”

However, The Seed Underground is not a grim story. It’s a story about seeds, after all, which Ray calls “the most hopeful thing in the world.” Moreover, it’s a story about a handful of quirky, charismatic, “quiet, under-the-radar” revolutionaries, who harvest and stow seeds in the back of refrigerators and freezers across America. Sylvia Davatz, a Vermont gardener who advocates that local food movements produce and promote locally grown seeds, calls herself the Imelda Marcos of seeds, because she has a thousand varieties in her closet. Yanna Fishman, the so-called sweet-potato queen, toils over a wild garden in the highlands of western North Carolina, where she grows 40 varieties of sweet potatoes. Dave Cavagnaro, an Iowan photographer, teaches people to hand-pollinate squash with masking tape to keep vintage varieties pure.

Seeds, it turns out, don’t just grow plants—they build stories, heritage, and history, which tend to be shared every time seeds pass from hand to hand. So it’s fitting that Ray, an accomplished nature writer and activist, shares some of her own story in The Seed Underground. When she was just a child, Ray got her first heirloom seeds from her grandmother—Jack beans, which resembled eyeballs. At 12 she set a brush fire trying to clear land for a garden. At 22 she joined Seed Savers Exchange.

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Perhaps we learn the most about Ray from her present-day gardens at Red Earth, her Georgia farm. Ray writes that in the garden, she is “an animal with a hundred different senses and all of them are switched on.” She grows crops like Fife Creek Cowhorn okra, Running Conch cowpea, and Green Glaze collard. Her barn is filled with drying seed heads; her kitchen is stinky with seeds fermenting. “Seeds proliferate in the freezer, in my office, in the seed bank, in the garden shed—in jars, credit card envelopes, coffee cans, medicine bottles, recycled seed packets.”

Ray outlines the basics of seed saving in The Seed Underground, but it is not a how-to book. It’s a call to action, which often reads like a lyrical love letter to the land and to varieties of squash and peas most of us have never tasted. It’s also a love letter to us, Ray’s readers. “Even though I may not know you, I have fallen in love with you, you who understand that a relationship to the land is powerful,” she writes.

The truth is, Janisse Ray is on a mission to turn you into a quiet, under-the-radar revolutionary, and if you read The Seed Underground, she just might succeed. At the very least, you will look at seeds—tiny, but vital to our survival —differently.

“A seed makes itself. A seed doesn’t need a geneticist or hybridist or publicist or matchmaker. But it needs help,” she writes. “Sometimes it needs a moth or a wasp or a gust of wind. Sometimes it needs a farm and it needs a farmer. It needs a garden and a gardener. It needs you.”

Abby Quillen wrote this article for How Cooperatives Are Driving the New Economy, the Spring 2013 issue of YES! Magazine. Abby is a freelance writer in Eugene, Ore. She blogs at newurbanhabitat.com.

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Cooperatives began to spread across rural America after President Franklin D. Roosevelt created the Rural Electrification Administration in 1935. The public-private partnerships brought electric power to any community willing to organize cooperatively. Many of those co-ops still exist today.

At right, Berea, Ky., homeowner Charles Cotton (center) was able to make energy efficiency improvements with the help of his electric cooperative, Jackson Energy, which has been around since the 1930s. Left is MACED Executive Director Justin Maxson and right is Program Coordinator Bill Blair.

Photo by Adam Padgett. Photo at left, Library of Congress.

Charles Cotton never gave much thought to the fact that he owns a piece of Jackson Energy Cooperative, the utility that delivers power to his home in Berea, Ky. His grandparents used to go every year to the co-op’s annual meeting and cook-out, where member-owners elect representatives and vote on cooperative business, but Cotton himself has never gone. He uses Jackson Energy simply because it’s the only utility serving his region.

But last November, Cotton’s membership paid off in a way he hadn’t expected: The cooperative gave him an energy upgrade, installing a plastic moisture barrier underneath his house and replacing his old furnace with an efficient heat pump. Cotton’s home now feels warmer and his electric bills have dropped significantly, but he never paid a dime up front.

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Jackson Energy’s status as a cooperative led directly to Cotton’s retrofit. It is one of four rural electric cooperatives participating in a pilot program called How$martKY, run by the Mountain Association for Community Economic Development (MACED). The program will let Cotton slowly pay back the cost of the retrofit: His bill is smaller than before, but he’s actually paying a bit more than the cost of the electricity he uses. The extra charge is how he repays the cost of the retrofit. It’s a scheme called on-bill financing—a way for people of all financial backgrounds to reap the benefits of energy efficiency without a big up-front cost.

Since on-bill programs like How$martKY are still experimental, MACED made a point of kicking off its pilot program by working with cooperatives. Investor-owned utilities are legally required to prioritize shareholder profits, and often can’t take on risky or unproven ventures. But electric cooperatives are required to maximize value for their members. That makes a cooperative potentially more willing to try out a program with an as-yet-unproven effect on the utility’s bottom line, but with the immediate potential to help member-owners and wean the region off fossil fuels. “Because they’re customer-owned, because they’re intent on customer satisfaction, it made sense to start with them,” says Justin Maxson, president of MACED.

The program is a small step forward in a region of the country underserved by renewables, but one with the potential to grow. “What we love is that it has a shot to make energy efficiency much more scalable,” says Maxson. “That’s especially important in Appalachia, where we’re so over-dependent on coal as our primary source of energy.”

Most of the nation’s electric cooperatives were founded on the idea that small steps can beget big change. Many such cooperatives date back to the 1930s (Jackson Energy started in 1938), when the electricity divide in the United States was stark: Approximately 90 percent of urban homes had power, and 90 percent of rural homes did not. For-profit utilities had little interest in building transmission lines in sparsely populated areas, so the federal government offered loans and encouraged farmers and ranchers to set up their own electric cooperatives. By the mid- ’40s, some 50 percent of rural Americans had electricity; by the mid-’50s, the vast majority did.

Now cooperatives form the largest electric utility network in the nation, serve some 42 million people in 47 states, generate $45 billion in annual revenue, and employ nearly 130,000 people. Approximately 78 percent of U.S. counties are served by electric cooperatives. Clean-energy advocates hope that network can be harnessed to bring big changes once again to America’s energy landscape.

A transformative influence?

The Rural Electrification Administration brought electric power to rural communities, many of whom built community refrigerators for meats and farm produce. Photo from early 1940s.

Co-op electricity, like that of the nation as a whole, comes from a mix of sources that varies by region—and because of cooperatives’ strong presence in coal-producing regions, their reliance on coal-fired power is higher than the national average. Still, 90 percent of electric cooperatives have at least some renewable power in their portfolios, and 96 percent offer some sort of energy efficiency program. As of 2007, co-ops got 3 percent more of their energy from renewable sources than did the nation’s utility sector as a whole.

Cooperatives around the country are pushing to do better. In 2008, a number of them banded together to form the National Renewables Cooperative Organization, an umbrella group that supports local co-ops in making the switch to renewable energy. The organization found that renewables make sense for cooperatives for more than environmental reasons. Diverse power sources can insulate members from volatile prices, and renewable energy projects can create jobs in the communities where members live.

In Tennessee, a cooperative is offering members direct stakes in a new solar farm. A Montana cooperative helped a city in its coverage area rebuild a failing hydroelectric plant. In Minnesota, an electric co-op is researching ways to combine hydro and wind power to achieve a more stable power supply. An Indiana co-op is operating 14 landfill gas-to-energy plants. A cooperative in Hawai‘i, which was set up 11 years ago when the petroleum-powered, for-profit utility went up for sale, is planning to provide 50 percent of its power from renewable sources within the next 10 years.

Co-ops find many reasons to pursue energy efficiency—as in South Carolina, where the energy demands of a quickly growing population threatened to overload the grid. Reluctant to take on the cost of building new nuclear or natural gas plants, a group of cooperatives created an on-bill financing pilot program similar to How$martKY. Since South Carolina has the nation’s highest percentage of manufactured homes (which, on average, use far more energy per square foot than traditional homes), efficiency is an easy target. Eventually, the co-ops hope to retrofit more than 200,000 homes, saving customers $280 million a year.

Photo from Library of Congress.

Electric co-ops are also pushing forward with “smart grid” upgrades—advanced technologies that increase efficiency, reliability, and the integration of new power sources. A consortium of cooperatives won a $68 million stimulus grant to test how in-home displays of energy consumption change consumer behavior and improve efficiency. Other co-ops have pursued similar projects on their own. In 2012, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission found that cooperatives lead the industry when it comes to the adoption of advanced metering systems. These let customers know how much energy they’re using, so they can scale back, and how strained the grid is, so they can save money by waiting until off-peak hours to use energy-intensive appliances.

Innovations adopted by cooperatives can quickly ripple out into the broader industry. Unlike for-profit utilities, which tend to be proprietary with their information, cooperatives make a point of collaborating. “While the co-ops are very much independent of each other in terms of the ultimate decision that gets made in the boardroom, there’s a lot of collaborative work that goes on,” says Martin Lowery, a vice president of the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association, which provides support services to about 1,000 electric cooperatives across the nation.

It’s a potentially powerful mix of local accountability and national connectivity. For example, Alaska’s Kotzebue Electric Association, located north of the Arctic Circle, is developing both wind and solar thermal generation projects in an effort to move away from expensive diesel fuel. As a result, cooperatives around the nation can learn from Kotzebue’s findings on battery storage in extreme conditions.

Beyond utilities

Some cooperatives have green energy written into their missions. Kaua‘i Island Utility Cooperative, for example, describes itself as “committed to reinventing how Kaua‘i is powered.” But many other co-ops would not go so far. Their goal is to provide reliable, low-cost energy to their members—whatever the source. Just like their investor-owned counterparts, many electric cooperatives have opposed environmental regulations, including the EPA’s decision to regulate greenhouse gases as pollutants. The choices of electric co-ops depend on their members: Renewables and energy efficiency are only a priority if members want them.

Still, the fact that so much of the nation runs on electricity that’s cooperatively managed represents a significant opportunity—particularly since many rural areas have lagged behind in efficiency and renewable power. Cooperatives have “a diverse infrastructure that’s hard to paint with one brush,” says Maxson. “But [they have] the potential to be a powerful point of leverage in supporting energy efficiency and economic opportunity in rural communities.”

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Lowery also believes cooperatives can spur deeper conversations among members about their values and their communities. That, after all, is the real difference between cooperative utilities and those owned by stockholders. Value to stockholders is narrowly defined: It means “profit.” But the members of electric cooperatives have the possibility of defining value in their own terms.
As members learn to recognize and utilize that power, Lowery envisions a much stronger push toward more sustainable energy. But he doesn’t stop there. His long-term goal is for members to use their cooperatives to solve problems that go beyond energy.

“It’s about being a facilitator, a catalyst for a dialogue about what’s going to be needed for a healthy and sustainable community in the future. That could mean responding to the needs of aging populations in rural America, the need for healthcare and broadband services, water quality and availability, educational opportunities for kids,” said Lowery.

“Electricity is a means to an end. We’re not utilities. We never were utilities. We’re there to meet the needs of communities and thereby improve their quality of life.”

Brooke Jarvis wrote this article for How Cooperatives Are Driving the New Economy, the Spring 2013 issue of YES! Magazine. Brooke is a contributing editor of YES! and a freelance journalist whose work has appeared in Rolling Stone, The Atlantic, The American Prospect, Aeon, among others. She lives on Puget Sound.

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United for Hire worker Jorge Funes paints the exterior of Greenfield Gardens in Springfield, Mass., one of the housing complexes owned by Alliance to Develop Power. Photo courtesy of ADP.

 

When Cecilia Pastor greeted us at the door of an empty unit at Spring Meadow Apartments in Springfield, Mass., she was surrounded by the harsh smell of paint and the cleaners she had used to scour the space to make it presentable for a new tenant. A petite 30-year-old woman, she was working for United for Hire, a worker-controlled landscaping, snow removal, and cleaning firm operated by the innovative nonprofit Alliance to Develop Power (ADP).
“One thing I have learned and really like in United for Hire is we work in a community economy, and the money circulates,” she said. “And we have good salaries where we can support our families.”

A powerful idea

“Building a community economy.” That ethic, heard from ADP members and workers alike, defines the Springfield-based nonprofit. Deputy Director Keya Hicks, who was an active member before joining the staff, explains the power of the idea, loosely taken from the work of the late feminist scholar Julie Graham: “These are folks who live right in the community. They want their lawns to be mowed. They want their snow to be removed. They work for United for Hire; they pay rent from those checks to keep the property running, so the wealth circulates in the community.”

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For a relatively poor city like Springfield and the surrounding area in the Pioneer Valley of western Massachusetts, this is a powerful idea. For the 21-year-old ADP, it means that enriching the social ties and cooperative ethic among its members and within the community is just as important as economic development or political organizing (a recent campaign stopped a transit fare hike). It is that larger vision of building a web of solidarity that distinguishes ADP and United for Hire from other community development organizations that also aim to stabilize the local economy, create affordable housing, and nurture advocacy.

Hicks joined ADP while living at one of the four independent complexes of Section 8 housing that are the social and economic anchor for ADP’s work. ADP created these “cooperatives,” as it calls them, by buying out existing housing developments from private owners and creating freestanding 501(c)(3) nonprofits for each, as required by the Department of Housing and Urban Development at the time. The tenants control their housing through a democratically elected board.

While legally independent of ADP, the four developments are represented on ADP’s board, and their tenants are a core part of ADP’s membership base. The management company that operates the housing largely hires ADP members to run them—including using United for Hire to maintain the grounds and apartments.

A new ownership model

“It’s quite simple how we got to the community ownership model,” where housing or the workplace are cooperatively run but not necessarily cooperatively owned, said ADP Executive Director Tim Fisk. “United for Hire started as a worker-owned co-op by tenants [of the four buildings] who said, ‘Why should we pay outsiders for landscaping?’” But many of the original founders drifted away, and the four who remained struggled without regular paychecks, doing seasonal work. In 2008, ADP bought out the remaining workers and turned the worker co-op into a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that it controls. Its nine workers now earn at least $15 an hour and are hired from among ADP’s activist base. Even though they are not owners, the workers—like those in a co-op—set policy and discuss work problems and politics at monthly meetings.
When people get confused about what a nonprofit is doing mowing lawns, “I just say this is a community-owned business,” says ADP Deputy Director William Cano.

Since early 2012, Craig Buchanan has served as United for Hire’s manager. He not only creates the crew’s schedules and organizes the monthly staff meetings, he uses his ties in the construction industry to prospect for new clients beyond the four housing cooperatives so that United for Hire can grow.

Shared benefits

In shifting United for Hire out of the worker-cooperative model, the community also faced a larger question: Why should the earnings be directed only to the worker owners? “Now … the surplus is distributed to all ADP members through the programming that we do,” said Fisk. That includes its advocacy for better economic conditions for the whole community, not only its workers.

ADP projects gross sales of $850,000, 40 percent of which goes to the workers in wages, with $200,000 supporting ADP. It has a total of 43 workers in its network. That includes those organizing for immigration reform or those staffing the ADP Worker Center/Casa Obrera, which fights for fair pay and offers ESL classes and affordable financial services to its 800 dues-paying members. It includes the 10-hour-a-week job that tenant Orlando Soto took on over the summer—he drove a truck that carried vegetables from a local farm to the Spring Meadow Complex making fresh produce accessible to very-low-income people. ADP bought shares in the farm’s harvest at the beginning of the growing season, and ran a farmers market onsite where residents and neighbors from the surrounding community could use cash or food stamps. Surplus produce was distributed through ADP’s food bank.

Searching for the cooperative ethic

In a city that is almost 39 percent Latino, about 23 percent black, and just over a third white, yet fairly segregated, the racial diversity and comity among the members and workers is striking. ADP encourages members to show solidarity and fight battles that might not immediately be their own—for instance, for accessible mass transit or fair immigration policy. New workers are recruited from community members who have stepped up in these struggles—they are more likely to have a cooperative ethic.

“What have you done in the community economy?” Fisk asks. “That’s more important than if you have experience banging nails. We can teach that. But the strength of ADP is in our shared values.”

Pastor became active in ADP through her husband’s involvement in the worker center. “He was receiving some worker rights training because he was being abused at his workplace at a construction company,” said Pastor. “I started getting involved in the community, ADP, and then got hired.”

Chris Fanous, 33, a native of Springfield, joined United for Hire after being active in the transit fight. “I was working in an auto parts store but I got laid off,” he said, taking a short break from fall cleanup on the grounds of Spring Meadows. “I ran into Craig in the [ADP] office and got scooped up.”

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It makes perfect sense to them that part of what they earn for United for Hire funds ADP advocacy in other areas. They were—and are—part of that advocacy and understand the power created by solidarity. They are earning more than a living wage from a steady paycheck: They are helping drive political transformation.

Now ADP is exploring how to get healthy food into the poorer areas of the Pioneer Valley. While still in the idea stage, ADP has to be careful not to promise too much. Cano explained that “in the base building stage, [people say] ‘I will participate if you can create a job for me.’ We were honest—this project will create jobs but we don’t want you to come in just for a job.”

Hicks explained the heart of the problem. Jobs are important. But if they are the main goal, “it also takes away from a concept of the true transformation of our communities.”

That means that along with jobs will come a cooperatively run venture that nurtures grassroots leadership and empowers members to contribute to their own well-being and that of their neighbors.

Abby Scher wrote this article for How Cooperatives Are Driving the New Economy, the Spring 2013 issue of YES! Magazine. Abby is a sociologist and journalist who writes frequently about economic justice. She is an Associate Fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies.

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Earlier this month, members of Florida’s Coalition of Immokalee Workers, along with allies including students and religious leaders, marched 200 miles in the Florida sun and rain to demand better wages and conditions for farmworkers.

Their journey began in the Gulf Coast city of Fort Myers and continued north to the central town of Lakeland. The march, which took two weeks to complete, was intended to put pressure on the grocery store company Publix to sign on to the coalition's "Fair Food Program." That program gives Florida tomato pickers a pay increase supported by a small price premium. Eleven companies have already signed the agreement, including Taco Bell, McDonald’s, and Chipotle.

Once in Lakeland, the marchers congregated at Publix headquarters, where they held a spirited rally. You can check out some highlights of that event in the video. The speeches, music, and the enthusiasm of the crowd are a testament to the powerful work the coalition is doing, and to the growing alliances between students, religious communities, and rural immigrant farmworkers.

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Tunis welcomed the World Social Forum with an opening march through the city center on March 26. Photo by Mirko Cecchi.

The springtime weather was hot and breezy as 50,000 people converged in the Tunisian capital of Tunis last week to discuss topics like debt, the Arab Spring, and drones. These were among the seemingly infinite variety of issues debated at the thirteenth annual World Social Forum.

The forum began in Brazil in 2001, and is held in a non-Western country every other year. The forum has emerged as a counterpoint to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where elite business and political leaders meet each year to discuss global issues from a largely corporate perspective.

In contrast, the World Social Forum is an open space for social movement participants, civil society, and individuals who are critical of imperialism and corporate-led global capitalism to network and exchange ideas on an international level.

Attendees have traditionally questioned the structural adjustment policies advocated by institutions like the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, in which countries are asked to balance their budgets by slashing spending, usually on items like the pay and pension of public employees. While the banks claim that these policies will lead to more prosperity, critics counter that they have more often led developing nations to accumulate crippling debts.

Flag-waving groups chanting “Free! Free! Palestine!” and tents filled with celebratory dancers dotted the campus of El Manar University, where the forum was held.

Getting in touch with the Arab Spring

Forum organizers chose Tunis as the host site this year in order to tap the energy of the grassroots mobilizations in the Middle East that overthrew dictatorial regimes in several counties and continue to struggle against them in others. Increasing the involvement of Arab activists has also been a goal of the forum for several years, according to a written statement released by organizers.

The Arab Spring was not “just something we read on Facebook,” Menon said.

Nearly everyone, from the local hosts to the foreign visitors, seemed to be thrilled with the selection of Tunisia as host. Arbia Oueslati, a young Tunisian woman representing ATADE, a local organization concerned with development and energy, saw the forum as a chance to counter negative perceptions of the country.

“It makes me so sad when embassies warn their citizens that it is not safe to travel here,” she said. “This will be proof that our country is safe, and also that we are a land of dialogue. People are worried about radical Islam coming to power in Tunisia, but I say it will never happen because Tunisians don’t accept extremists.”

Meena Menon, of Focus on the Global South—a group that promotes social change in Asia, Latin America and Africa—and a former member of the forum’s International Council, was excited that participants from other developing countries had the opportunity to interact with the Tunisian people. “Tunisia is the best thing that’s happened to the forum in my view,” she told a panel audience. Bringing foreign activists to Tunisia helped to show that the Arab Spring was not “just something we read on Facebook,” she said, but “something that was done by real living, breathing people—and people who aren’t even trained in mobilization.”

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The forum usually results in a huge manifestation of local civil society wherever it is held, and this year was no exception. The Organizing Committee estimated that around a quarter of the over 4,500 groups registered were Tunisian. Many of these groups are working to ensure that the goals of the Arab Spring revolution here remain in focus.

Many were upset that the current Tunisian and Egyptian governments continue to negotiate with neoliberal institutions such as the International Monetary Fund.

Of these goals, democracy and fair elections were probably the most urgent. Prominent secular politician Chokri Belaid was killed by unidentified assassins in early February, provoking public outcry. His memory was honored widely at the forum, in forms that ranged from T-shirts and posters bearing his image to a moment of silence at the closing General Assembly to honor both Belaid and the late Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez.

While failures of the Tunisian and Egyptian governments to accomplish the goals of the revolutions that brought them to power were a key concern, forum participants remained hopeful that the populations in these countries will continue to hold them accountable. In one workshop, Nadeem Mansour of the Egyptian Center for Economic and Social Rights spoke of the more than 4,000 protests over financial issues that took place last year in Egypt.

“Large-scale social resistance, although it has not yet crystallized into a new economic plan, forces any government that might come to power to rethink current economic policy,” he said.

Linking up personal and national debt

Many participants felt that a renewed focus on debt was a crucial piece of that process of rethinking. Sandra Nurse from New York City came to the forum as an individual, but was thinking about what she could bring back to her local chapter of Strike Debt, an Occupy-derived movement that works to “build popular resistance to all forms of debt.” She said she was particularly interested in how Strike Debt might be able to evolve from its current focus on individual debt and forge a connection with groups that work to address the social impact of national debt.

Nurse said that the group chose to focus on debt because it’s a personal experience and motivates people deeply. “But now our challenge is to really expand the analysis and connect personal debt to sovereign debt.”

National debt was also on the minds of several Middle Eastern participants. Many were upset that the current Tunisian and Egyptian governments continue to negotiate with neoliberal institutions such as the International Monetary Fund. “One of the main challenges we face now is foreign debt,” said one participant from Tunisia. “I cannot understand how a revolution can compromise on this issue. The current regimes should immediately stop paying the foreign debt.”

Concern over drones

The seeds of a new global anti-drone movement seemed to emerge in a workshop led by U.S. feminist anti-war group CODEPINK. Participants from multiple countries expressed concern about their governments’ interest in acquiring drones.

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Even in cases where drones are only being considered for border-maintenance surveillance purposes, workshop attendees said this would ultimately lead to increased violence and repression of immigrants.

“Afghanistan has really been the testing ground for NATO countries in terms of drone usage,” said CODEPINK co-founder Medea Benjamin. “Now they have a taste for it, and everyone wants to have the latest technology. None of the militaries want to be left behind. So we see this as the beginning of a global arms race in drone warfare.”

Many of the workshop attendees stayed after the session was over to discuss organizing an international citizens’ movement to advocate for global regulation on drones. E-mails were exchanged that very night in an effort to start planning a global gathering in a European city for the fall. One of the early tasks of the group will be to identify potentially sympathetic governments to work with.

Benjamin said more information would be available soon at droneswatch.org

Signe Predmore wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Signe is a former editorial intern at YES! and is currently writing her Master’s thesis about the World Social Forum.

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Click here to read the
original essay,
No More Steubenvilles: How to Raise Boys to Be Kind Men

Dear Jane Doe,
I am the mother who wrote about teaching our boys to be kind. As I hit "publish" on that essay about the ways in which parents must take responsibility for raising sons to be brave protectors, I was thinking about you. My words about teaching kindness went viral, and the conversation turned from you, to us--parents. What can we do? I have been honored to be one tiny voice in a sea of outrage, all of us offering solutions, working hard to turn our grief into change.

And yet...

When I wrote "No More Steubenvilles: How to Raise Boys to be Kind Men," it was not the first story that I wanted to tell after Steubenville. It was the second.

The first? It was ...

 

Dear Jane Doe,

Me too.

Me too. But I couldn't say that. I was too afraid, too steeped in shame, too concerned about what everyone might think of me. Now don't get me wrong--what I said about raising boys, I believe with every ounce of my being. Teach them to be kind, to be brave, to be helpers. Teach them to take responsibility for their sexuality; teach them to shed their uniforms of entitlement and replace them with badges of honor.

Not just because it's the right thing to do, but because then they will no longer be able to hurt girls like you ...

I knew to carry pepper spray and a whistle, just in case a bad guy jumped out of the bushes or eased himself out of a doorway in a dark alley. But my lab partner never jumped out of the bushes.

and girls like me.

I was 18. A freshman at a well-known, conservative university. Smart, cheerful, away from home for the first time. Armed with my fair share of life experience, a confident sense of my own sexuality, and with a deeply researched knowledge of feminism, sexism, and other very evolved -isms. I was hardly what one would consider a target.

The young man who raped me was my lab partner. He was rugged and handsome, boyishly charming, and very well-liked; a fraternity brother, a star athlete from a very small town who had landed a spot on our university's rugby team.

I was a former cheerleader, well-versed in how "Friday Night Lights" could illuminate the shadows that followed respected young athletes. I went to Welcome Week, freshman orientation, and a safety skills workshop. I knew that I needed to surround myself with trusted girlfriends, forming an insular line of protection for each other when we went out at night. I knew where the call boxes were in the darkened parking lot. I knew to carry pepper spray and a whistle, just in case a bad guy jumped out of the bushes or eased himself out of a doorway in a dark alley.

But my lab partner never jumped out of the bushes. He never cornered me in a dark alley. He invited me to study at his apartment. He said that there was a lot that he could learn from a cute girl who was getting an A+ in Chemistry. (I was getting an A+ in Chemistry, did I mention that?!) I didn't drink anything that night. He was handsome and polite and an upperclassman, and I wondered if he maybe probably oh my gosh what if he wanted to date me. And still I reminded him sweetly that I wasn't interested in messing around--just to be clear about my boundaries. Because all young women know that it's their responsibility to set the boundaries.

I'm not saying he didn't know better: I'm saying that he did, and he didn't care.

There were pictures of his mother on the bulletin board in his room. Pink Floyd on the CD player. To this day, when I hear the cold "clink, clink" of the change machine at the end of that album, I want to throw up, because I can picture myself floating somewhere outside of my body, watching what unfolded on his waterbed, listening to his voice ignore mine.

When he finished, he asked me if I was OK.

As I stumbled from his room that night, he insisted that he walk me to my car. Back then, I couldn't reconcile the disturbing irony that made him act concerned for my safety as I walked to the parking lot. I realize that he knew what he had done. And he was afraid of what I would do next. He was somebody's son. He loved his mother. But no one had ever taught him what consent looked like, sounded like, felt like. He really believed that I was his to do with as he wished. He didn't respect me--he didn't feel like he needed to. I'm not saying he didn't know better: I'm saying that he did, and he didn't care. He was righteous, he was intoxicated, and he was entitled.

He went back to a waterbed that was streaked with blood.

I drove out to the middle of an abandoned farm, and sat there as the sun rose over the dusty fields. I sat there with my hand over my mouth, the music in my car drowning out the staccato drumbeat of my racing heart. And then I went back to my dorm and I showered. Twice.

My essay was a promise to you, and a promise to the little boy who snuggles next to me in the bottom bunk every night: that girls like you will never be hurt by boys like mine.

Girls who volunteer at the Women's Center don't get raped. Girls who get an A+ in Chemistry don't get raped. Girls who tell their roommates that they are "just going to study, I'll be fine, don't wait up," do not get raped. Girls who know better do not get raped. I was reading Ntozake Shange for my History of Women's Theater class! Women who read great feminist literature do not get raped!

And if they do, they know not to shower after ... oh... my... god.

My dorm-mates were streaming in to the bathroom to brush their teeth and get ready for the day. I was standing under the hot water, praying that it would wash away the shame and fear that mixed with my blood.

There was too much blood.

Months later, I would thank God for the rivers of red that ran from my body that night and into the next morning, because it was a physical reminder of how badly I had been hurt. When my face flushed dark with embarrassment as I spoke to a police officer, I remembered the blood. When I sat in the waiting room of Planned Parenthood and waited for my name to be called, I remembered the blood. When I doubted myself, or blamed myself, or reprimanded myself for even existing on this earth as a woman that a man would want to harm, I remembered the blood.

Jane Doe, when I heard about what happened to you that night in Steubenville, I remembered the blood. I wanted to heal you, to help you, to wrap you up in the soft net of understanding that connects survivors everywhere, and tell you that you were going to be OK.

But I couldn't. So I reached out to you the only way that I knew how, by promising you that I would raise my son to be kind. It was important to me to promise you that. But there were more memories that I wasn't brave enough to write.

I wanted for you to know that the tremendous outpouring of love and empathy that erupted after my essay went viral was for you.

Jane Doe, when I heard your story, I thought about me.

I thought about me, but I wrote about Max. I wrote about my sweet son, and how hard I was going to try to raise him to understand the difference between right and wrong. My essay was a promise to you, and a promise to the little boy who snuggles next to me in the bottom bunk every night: that girls like you will never be hurt by boys like mine.

Eve Ensler: Freedom Starts
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And then I heard from hundreds of mothers who echoed my refrain, and pledged to raise their sons to be kind. I heard from fathers, who gave gentle reminders that they needed to do their part too. Many of them were angry that I had overlooked the enormous role that fathers have in defining the character of their sons, and I was proud of them for speaking up and reminding me that my audience is not just made up of devoted mothers, but of involved fathers as well. They were right.

I heard from a Reverend who was using these ideas in his weekly sermon, a Kindergarten teacher who was teaching these principles to 5-year-olds sitting cross-legged on carpet squares. A former DA gave examples from her career about how the act of nurturing young men can outweigh the outside influences that teach them to cause pain.

I spoke on a panel with changemakers, authors, and athletes--all adults who are committed to righting the wrongs that happened to you. Jane Doe, more than 60,000 strangers shared my promise to you on Facebook. I talked about it on the radio. I watched the numbers climb. I was proud, and bursting at the seams with hope and compassion and the kindness of the human spirit. I wanted for you to know that the tremendous outpouring of love and empathy that erupted after my essay went viral was for you. The numbers and the messages and the warmth were not mine to own. They belonged to you.

I didn't realize how much I needed to hear those messages until later, when I read a beautiful piece from a very brave writer. I realized that she had the courage to say what I couldn't.

My essay was a love letter to the 18-year-old me, and the not-quite-grown-up you, and all of the other women warriors who found themselves alone and afraid on their own "morning after."

She said, me too. I thought about that writer as I drove alone in my car one afternoon, hundreds of miles and over a dozen years away from my "morning after." I finally understood. I wasn't alone. I was afraid to speak my own truth, but I didn't need to be because grown women all over the Internet were standing up and saying "me too": Married women, single women, successful women, professional women. Mothers. Sisters. Leaders.

That's when I realized that my article on kindness wasn't just for my beautiful son, but for Tracy, the author of the piece I read, and for you, and ultimately, for me. It was for all of us. For all of the women who tried to do the right thing and got hurt anyway. My essay was a love letter to the 18-year-old me, and the not-quite-grown-up you, and all of the other women warriors who found themselves alone and afraid on their own "morning after." If we can raise our sons to be kind, then perhaps we can save the rest of us.

Dear Jane Doe, come link your arm with mine, as we join the thousands of women across this country who will finally whisper to each other "me too."

In Healing,

Kim

Kim Simon is a mother and social worker. She blogs at Mama By the Bay and tweets at www.twitter.com/mamabythebay

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Donald Trump golfs on the Aberdeenshire dunes. Photo by You've Been Trumped.

When British indie film director Anthony Baxter heard that real-estate baron Donald Trump was planning to build a luxury golf resort near the Scottish farming town of Balmedie, he thought the news coverage was suspicious. The glowingly positive buzz around the course couldn’t be telling the whole story.

“The media coverage around the golf course didn’t have the skeptical angle you’d expect, which seemed very odd,” Baxter said. So he decided to provide that angle himself. He set off for Aberdeenshire, the county where Trump was building the course, and the documentary You’ve Been Trumped began to take form.

According to the BBC, Trump called the wind farm “the destruction of Aberdeen and Scotland itself.”

Spanning the year-long construction of Trump’s first Aberdeenshire golf course—Trump plans to eventually build three courses and a 450-room luxury hotel—the film provides the critical inspection missing from mainstream media accounts. It exposes irreparable environmental damage to an area of pristine seaside dunes designated as a “Site of Special Scientific Interest”, suspiciously complicit government action, and shameless bullying by the Trump Organization.

The seaside dunes of Aberdeenshire. Photo by Bryan Watson.

The documentary has no narrator. Instead, the Aberdeenshire farmers living at the edge of Trump’s course, and other locals, tell the story themselves. Baxter’s film juxtaposes footage of the simple reality of the farmers’ lives shot on handheld cameras with the glossy, pre-cooked media promotion of Trump and his project. “David and Goliath” meets “The Little Engine That Could” as families carry on a drawn-out struggle of increasing difficulty against a monolithic corporate force willing to manipulate and harass in pursuit of its goals—disputing property lines, cutting off water, and Trump himself publicly insulting locals who resisted the project.

The documentary team wrapped up their filming in 2010, but the conflict between Trump and the residents of Aberdeenshire continues. Earlier this week, the Scottish government approved plans for an offshore wind farm, despite Trump’s promise to scrap plans for a luxury hotel if the turbines were built due to his belief that they would spoil the view for golfers. According to the BBC, Trump called the wind farm “the destruction of Aberdeen and Scotland itself,” and issued a round of lawsuit threats.

Both the documentary and the residents of Aberdeenshire have won further victories in the form of global recognition. You’ve Been Trumped has received 10 major industry awards as well as universal critical acclaim, while IMDb users gave it the highest rating of any British film listed in the Internet database. In recognition of the locals’ struggles, The Scotsman named local farmer Michael Forbes, the face of the anti-Trump effort, “Scotsman of the Year.”

“It’s made me more committed to trying to get to the truth,” Baxter said, encouraged by the film’s success despite earlier skepticism from industry executives. “It just goes to show that you’ve got to make the film you want to make and follow your heart in telling a story. And by doing that, you will win through in the end.”

YOU'VE BEEN TRUMPED THEATRICAL TRAILER from Montrose Pictures on Vimeo.

Chris Francis wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Chris is a recent graduate from Illinois Wesleyan University where he studied English literature and religion while working as managing editor and editor-in-chief of IWU’s student newspaper, The Argus.

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YES! is nominated alongside remarkable peers Orion, Adbusters, and newcomer Tomorrow Magazine (a “one-shot magazine about creative destruction” founded by editors of GOOD magazine who were collectively fired last year).

The awards, which honor media outlets in nine categories, were originally called the Utne Independent Press Awards and recognized the best in independent print media. This year, the organization says it has expanded to include online news:

“Considering the wealth of amazing new ideas, exceptional writing, and outstanding journalism taking place on the Internet, we think it’s time the name of the award encompass every form of mass communication we come across each day from longform print journalism to video blogs.”

Recent winners in the General Excellence category include Orion, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and Mother Jones.

YES! has received prior nominations in the categories of General Excellence, Political Coverage, Cultural Coverage, and Health and Wellness.

The 2013 winners will be announced in May at the Magazine Publishers of America’s Independent Magazine Media Conference in New Orleans.

 

Read more: http://www.utne.com/media/2013-utne-media-awards-nominees.aspx#ixzz2OlOzZzy8

This article originally appeared in the Christian Science Monitor.

A married lesbian couple in New York. Photo by Jose Antonio Navas.

It has been 10 years since the U.S. Supreme Court last issued a landmark ruling expanding gay rights in America.

It came in a 2003 case called Lawrence v. Texas. In striking down a Texas anti-sodomy law, the high court declared that intimate sexual conduct between consenting adults was off limits to government regulation.

The author of that decision, Justice Anthony Kennedy, was well aware that he'd just delivered an extraordinary victory to gay rights advocates. Nonetheless, he included an unusual disclaimer near the conclusion of his opinion.

Justice Kennedy said the court's decision that day would have no wider application in the looming showdown over same-sex marriage.

The justices have agreed to examine whether same-sex couples are entitled to be treated equally.

"Do not believe it," conservative Justice Antonin Scalia roared in dissent.

"Today's opinion dismantles the structure of constitutional law that has permitted a distinction to be made between heterosexual and homosexual unions, insofar as formal recognition in marriage is concerned," he wrote.

Now, a decade later, the nation is about to find out who was right—Kennedy in his limiting disclaimer or Justice Scalia in his dire warning.

On March 26 and 27, the U.S. Supreme Court is set to hear two potential landmark gay rights cases, both dealing with the issue of same-sex marriage.

This marks the first time in 40 years that the high court is being asked to fundamentally redefine what marriage is in the United States. In the process, the high court is injecting itself squarely into one of the most divisive social issues of the past quarter century.

The outcome could affect hundreds of millions of dollars in federal marriage benefits currently limited to heterosexual spouses.

As in 2003, gay rights advocates are again hoping to win the potentially decisive swing vote of Kennedy. They are also hoping that the substance of Scalia's impassioned constitutional analysis in his dissent back in 2003 holds true in 2013.

"Lawrence was a very important turning point. It removed a huge roadblock on the path to gay marriage," says Dale Carpenter, a University of Minnesota Law School professor and author of “Flagrant Conduct: The Story of Lawrence v. Texas.”

The decision lifted a legal stigma surrounding homosexuality and—despite Kennedy's disclaimer—it established a constitutional foundation that has influenced every subsequent court decision involving same-sex marriage.

Specifically at issue before the high court this month are two measures that seek to preserve the traditional definition of marriage.

The first is a 2008 ballot initiative in California known as Proposition 8, which defines marriage in the state constitution as a legal union of one man and one woman. The second case is a challenge to the 1996 federal Defense of Marriage Act, or DOMA, which for purposes of federal benefits also defines marriage as a union of one man and one woman.

Lawyers challenging the measures argue that Prop. 8 and DOMA violate the rights of same-sex couples by treating them like second-class citizens. "With the full authority of the state behind it, Proposition 8 sends a clear and powerful message to gay men and lesbians: You are not good enough to marry. Your loving relationship is not equal to or respected enough to qualify to be called a marriage," writes Washington lawyer Theodore Olson in his brief seeking to overturn Prop. 8.

On the other side, lawyers counter that it is proponents of same-sex marriage who are seeking to change an institution that has existed throughout history as the symbolic joining of male and female. Preservation of this tradition is not discrimination, they say.

"Providing special recognition to one class of individuals does not demean others who are not similarly situated," writes Washington lawyer Charles Cooper in his brief urging the court to uphold Prop. 8. "It is simply not stigmatizing for the law to treat different things differently, or to call different things by different names."

Is marriage a right?

The most basic question at the heart of the debate over same-sex marriage is whether the U.S. Constitution protects a fundamental right to marry regardless of sexual orientation.

Kennedy went on to identify a constitutionally protected zone of personal liberty beyond the reach of the government.

Gay marriage proponents say it clearly does. Supporters of traditional marriage counter that the Supreme Court has never recognized such a right. They cite a 40-year-old precedent, Baker v. Nelson, that upheld a Minnesota law restricting marriage to one man and one woman.

But that's not the precise issue before the court. The justices have agreed to examine whether same-sex couples are entitled—under the Constitution's equal protection provisions—to be treated equally when it comes to marriage and the benefits of marriage.

That's where Scalia's prediction in the 2003 case may prove prophetic, and perhaps decisive. The Texas statute invalidated in 2003 had been justified by state lawmakers as a reflection of society's shared view that homosexual conduct was immoral. Kennedy's opinion rejected the use of sexual morality as a justification for criminalizing a consenting adult's private intimate conduct.

But the court didn't stop there. Kennedy went on to identify a constitutionally protected zone of personal liberty beyond the reach of the government involving the most intimate and private aspects of human relationships.

"Our laws and traditions afford constitutional protection to personal decisions relating to marriage, procreation, contraception, family relationships, child rearing, and education," he wrote.

Kennedy added: "Persons in a homosexual relationship may seek autonomy for these purposes, just as heterosexual persons do."

Because of the Lawrence decision, they can't argue that society views homosexual conduct as immoral. That argument is off the table.

Despite Kennedy's disclaimer that the Texas decision was not about same-sex marriage, the opinion had an immediate and profound effect on the debate over the issue. Within five months, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court declared that same-sex couples in the state enjoyed a fundamental right to marry under the Massachusetts Constitution. It thus became the first state in the US to establish a state-based constitutional right to same-sex marriage.

The first and most frequently cited case in the Massachusetts decision: Lawrence v. Texas. In the years since, eight other states and the District of Columbia have recognized same-sex marriages. At the same time 30 states passed constitutional amendments defining marriage as a union between one man and one woman. Eight other states adopted statutes enforcing the same traditional definition.

Shifting the debate

To prevail at the high court, supporters of California's Prop. 8 and DOMA must be able to offer a persuasive justification for treating gay and lesbian couples differently from heterosexual couples.

Because of the Lawrence decision, they can't argue that society views homosexual conduct as immoral. That argument is off the table.

Instead, proponents of the traditional view of marriage argue that the government is entitled to grant preferential treatment to couples of the opposite sex to encourage what it considers the ideal arrangement for raising children: two biological parents in a stable home, providing male and female role models for their own children.

Traditional marriage supporters contend that the institution would be irrevocably eroded to the detriment of biological fathers and mothers – and children – if same-sex marriages are permitted. Such views are influenced by religious beliefs, biblical teachings, and people's own sense of morality.

Gay marriage proponents counter that same-sex couples are capable of raising well-adjusted children in stable, loving homes just as well as married heterosexual couples. Male-female procreation can't be a qualification for marriage, they say, because infertile couples and the elderly are allowed to wed with no inquiry into their ability or propensity to make babies.

One of the most effective tactics of gay rights activists has been to shift the debate. Instead of asking society to expand its view of marriage to accommodate them, same-sex marriage proponents have attacked those supporting the traditional view of marriage as bigots enforcing marriage exclusivity out of animosity toward gays and lesbians. They compare opposition to same-sex marriage to state laws that once banned interracial marriage, a vestige of the "white supremacy" movement.

In 1967, the Supreme Court struck down Virginia's ban on interracial marriage in a landmark case, Loving v. Virginia. The court said the ban represented invidious racial discrimination in violation of the Equal Protection Clause.

Supporters of traditional marriage counter that the Loving case addresses restricting marriage by race but says nothing about marriage by people of the same sex.

Gay rights activists also argue that same-sex marriage in America is inevitable. They say it is just a matter of time before stereotypes and hostility give way to a more open and compassionate view.

But that argument cuts both ways. Lawyers for same-sex couples seek action in the courts because they say the political system is hostile and rigged against them.

They argue that majorities at the polls, in Congress, and in certain state legislatures are using their political clout to oppress gay Americans and discriminate against them. They cite Prop. 8 and DOMA as prime examples.

Lawyers supporting traditional marriage reject the view that same-sex couples are politically powerless. They note that gay marriage is now recognized in nine states and that the campaign enjoys substantial and growing support from a number of political leaders – including President Obama. For the high court to decide the same-sex marriage debate now with a ruling that would apply nationwide would short-circuit the ongoing political process, they say.

Some conservative analysts compare the situation to the abortion debate, and how the Supreme Court's controversial ruling in Roe v. Wade triggered a generation of turmoil and protest rather than allowing the issue to percolate politically and achieve some measure of compromise.

"We don't think this debate should be prematurely ended by a decree from this court or any other court," says Austin Nimocks, senior counsel with Alliance Defending Freedom, which supports the traditional definition of marriage. "We are asking the Supreme Court to continue to allow communities to go through that [political] process and continue to debate the meaning of marriage, its impact on those communities, and how it should be defined."

Strengthening marriage by expanding it?

Amid all the debate, litigation, and legislation of the past decade, attitudes about same-sex marriage have shifted. In 2003, at the time of the Lawrence decision, 58 percent of Americans opposed same-sex marriage and 33 percent supported it, according to polling by the Pew Research Center. By 2012, the number of Americans opposed to same-sex marriage had fallen to 43 percent, with 48 percent saying they supported the idea.

Many traditionalists are motivated by fears that any expansion of marriage to include same-sex couples will accelerate its demise and encourage other nontraditional unions. There is no doubt that marriage in the U.S. is under siege.

Two generations ago the mere mention of divorce was food for scandal, and the idea of conceiving a child outside a marriage was unthinkable. Today, roughly half of all marriages end in divorce, and nearly 41 percent of American children are born to an unmarried woman.

But some analysts question whether it is fair to blame these monumental shifts on same-sex couples who are themselves seeking the stability and monogamy of marriage and family, and who want to share responsibility for raising the next generation of Americans.

From their perspective, they are not seeking to tear down marriage. Like the opponents arrayed against them, they say they want to help strengthen the institution.

Although the Prop. 8 and DOMA cases are potential landmark decisions, it is unclear how the high court may rule. Like many hotly contested cases before the court, legal analysts say the nine-member tribunal is likely to split 4 to 4 among liberal and conservative justices, with Kennedy holding the margin of victory.

"Many of these briefs might well begin with the words: Dear Justice Kennedy," Professor Carpenter says.

Lawyers for same-sex couples want Kennedy to take up where he left off in the Lawrence decision and establish heightened civil rights protections for gay and lesbian Americans like those for African-Americans and women.

In contrast, lawyers supporting traditional marriage are seeking to channel that part of Kennedy that found it necessary to write the disclaimer in the Lawrence decision.

One of their strongest arguments is that it is not the right time for the high court to intervene in the same-sex marriage debate. Gays and lesbians are beginning to achieve political success at the state and national level, but the vast majority of states still maintain the traditional definition of marriage. There is no critical mass of states seeking change.

By the time the high court declared bans on interracial marriage unconstitutional in the Loving case in 1967, all but 16 states had already repealed their anti-miscegenation laws. In 1960, all 50 states had anti-sodomy laws. By 2003 when the high court declared such laws invalid in the Lawrence decision, 37 states had already repealed their sodomy laws. Only 13 still had them on the books.

Contrast that with the current landscape for same-sex marriage. Nine states, and the District of Columbia, recognize it—but 41 do not. "I'm unaware of Justice Kennedy ever having voted to strike down the laws of 41 states," Carpenter says.

43 years of debate

What will prove decisive? No one knows.

In landmark cases, appearances are sometimes important. It won't help the cause of same-sex marriage that the two lead plaintiffs in the Massachusetts case, Hillary and Julie Goodrich, won their battle to marry but remained together for only two years. Their divorce was final in July 2009.

In contrast, consider the experience of Jack Baker and Michael McConnell. They are the gay couple that sued in Minnesota in 1970 for the right to marry—and lost. The case set a longstanding precedent allowing states to deny marriage to same-sex couples.

"That's the first big court decision on gay rights," Carpenter says. "That couple sued to be married in 1970 when nobody imagined that this was a possibility."

It was a time when most states still allowed the firing of gay people from state jobs, when the federal government would not give gay people security clearances, when gays could not serve in the military, and when police were raiding gay bars.

Despite the hostility of society, rejection by lawmakers, and dismissive rulings by judges, Mr. Baker and Mr. McConnell are still together in Minnesota living as a committed couple—43 years later.

Starkly different perceptions of marriage, coupled with the clash of legal arguments in a country still deeply polarized on the issue of gay rights, make these two of the most watched—and significant – cases before the court in a generation.

Warren Richey wrote this article for the Christian Science Monitor, where it originally appeared.

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This article originally appeared in Greater Good.

Like a lot of TV viewers these days, we binge-watch our favorite shows on Netflix, consuming two, three, or more episodes—sometimes entire seasons—at a time.

But little do we realize, bingers like us are cheating ourselves out of happiness.

That’s the lesson from new research in the field of positive psychology. What this research shows is that indulging in life’s pleasures in smaller doses, or even giving them up for stretches of time, helps us enjoy them significantly more.

In one new study, published in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science, researchers Jordi Quoidbach and Elizabeth Dunn had 55 people eat a piece of chocolate and report how they felt. Then the researchers instructed some of those people to abstain from chocolate for a week, told others to eat as much chocolate as they wanted, and gave a third group no special instructions.

When all 55 people ate another piece of chocolate at the end of the week, the people who had abstained from chocolate reported significantly greater happiness than either the bingers or the people left to their own devices.

In fact, the bingers reported feeling less happy after their end-of-week chocolate than they’d felt after eating their piece at the start of the week.

While this is the first study to find that temporarily giving up something pleasurable may be good for our happiness, it builds on years of similar results. One study found that people enjoyed an episode of the old sitcom “Taxi” more if it included commercials than if it did not. In another recent paper, people said they took greater enjoyment from positive experiences (sitting in a massage chair, listening to Japanese hip-hop) when those experiences were briefly interrupted.

As it turns out, people tend to get used to sources of joy and pleasure very quickly, soon taking them for granted. And when you have more of something pleasurable, it becomes easier to take it for granted, and harder to savor it. The result is a psychic numbing to the good things in life.

And it gets worse. While that numbing effect may sound obvious, we’re generally unaware of it in our own lives: Studies show that people (mistakenly) think that getting more of the things they value will make them happier.

At the same time, we tend to underestimate how consuming in moderation might boost our enjoyment—and happiness—in the long run: Participants in the “Taxi,” massage chair, and Japanese hip hop studies all thought the experience would be more enjoyable without interruptions. They were wrong.

Indeed, so much of our everyday behavior is driven by the misconception that more is better. We celebrate our most important holidays by cooking twice as much food as we need, then scarfing it down. We work hard to get a promotion—then after getting it, start thinking about how to get the next one. We stay up all night tearing through “House of Cards” or the latest season of “Mad Men.”

What’s more, this same misconception about happiness leads many people to covet wealth and material things. Research suggests that more money can bring us more happiness, but only until we earn up to about $75,000/year. After that, there seems to be a negligible increase in happiness from making more money, meaning that many of us waste a lot of time pursuing a happiness we’ll never reach. Or worse, our single-minded pursuit of wealth stresses us out, compromises our values, and strains our relationships—without bringing that elusive boost in happiness.

All of this research points to a paradox of happiness: It’s not tied to abundance but to recognizing and appreciating what we do have. Once we meet our basic needs, our lives become more satisfying if we can savor and be grateful for the good that’s already around us, before we strive for more.

This can be easier said than done. But coincidentally, millions of Americans have been getting a jumpstart on moderation over the past month with their observance of Lent.

For Christians, this is supposed to be a period of repentance and self-denial, of course, a time to give up meat, chocolate, sex, and other indulgences as a way to atone for sins. But Quoidbach and Dunn’s research suggests it may carry some other benefits: Temporarily denying themselves certain pleasures for 40 days may ultimately make people happier than consistently indulging in them. In other words, a religious ritual of renunciation might actually feel pretty good in the end.

At a time when science and religion are often seen as at odds with one another, it’s encouraging to see them both validate a basic, counter-intuitive message: Sometimes we get a lot from giving stuff up.

 

 

Jason Marsh is the editor in chief of Greater Good, the online magazine of UC Berkeley's Greater Good Science Center, where this article originally appeared.

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Click to view photos of Saturday's Idle No More event. All photos by Kristin Hugo.

On a rare sunny March day in the Pacific Northwest, a group of indigenous people and non-indigenous supporters gathered at Seattle's Golden Gardens Park to continue the work of the Idle No More movement. The event featured speeches about the dangers that environmental destruction poses to the native way of life, an enormous salmon puppet, and a water-blessing ceremony.

The event was part of the Idle No More movement, which started in Canada through opposition to the C-45 omnibus spending bill. The bill, which passed in December, changed the Indian Act, amended the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act, and removed thousands of lakes and streams from federal protection.

Sweetwater Nannauck, one of the event's organizers. Photo by Kristin Hugo.

Speakers from the Duwamish, Suquamish, and Lummi tribes gathered to condemn the bill as environmentally destructive and to voice their concern about a local plan to create a coal export facility in Washington State near the Canadian border. These plans would involve having nine trains per day travel north along the coast carrying coal. The trains, each of which would be 1.5 miles long, would bring the coal to the proposed Gateway Pacific Terminal at Cherry Point, which is expected to ship about 48 million metric tons of coal per year to Asian countries, including China. Native communities are concerned that the coal would contaminate local water, on which they depend for their traditional diet, which includes salmon, clams, and other seafood.

The event also included a ceremony, in which Sweetwater Nannauck, one of the event's organizers, blessed containers of water that people had brought from their own regions. Participants walked to the shore of Puget Sound with protest signs, a large banner, and the giant salmon in tow. Drumbeats and chants accompanied the procession, which marched behind Nannauck until she reached the coast and poured her blessed water into the sound. The other participants followed suit with their own water, some of which was brought from faraway places in the state.

Bill C-45 remains a major point of concern for indigenous people across North America.

“We still need to stand strong with [the Canadian First Nations],” Nannauck said. “Because whatever happens there, it's going to go through trains here, it's going to go through our waters here, it's going to affect future generations for many years to come.”

Kristin Hugo wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Kristin is an online intern at YES! and a graduate of the program in journalism of California State University at Northridge.

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Photo by the author.

A few things are certain about Kimani Gray’s death on the night of March 9: We know that around 11:30 p.m., a group of teenagers gathered on a residential street in the Brooklyn neighborhood of East Flatbush after leaving a birthday party. We know it was a cold, clear night on the cusp of spring, and that Kimani, or “Kiki,” was the son of Caribbean immigrant parents, with a round face that made him look younger than his 16 years. We know that two undercover officers fired 11 bullets, seven of which pierced his body. We know that, when the ambulance pulled into the hospital, he was already dead.

The rest is in dispute. Kimani may have pulled out a gun—or he may have been hitching up his baggy jeans. The officers may have showed their badges and may have given him fair warning. His last words may have been, “Please don’t let me die.”

Kimani’s shooting coincides with increasing criticism of the NYPD’s controversial “stop and frisk” policy, which allows officers to search anyone at any time.

Police sources have reportedly cited Kimani’s four prior arrests as a justification for the shooting. Meanwhile, more information on the two officers in question has come to light: they have a history of rights abuses, with five lawsuits against them that have already cost the NYPD upwards of $200,000. Still, Mayor Bloomberg supports their actions , and John Cerar, the former NYPD commander for firearms training, told The New York Times that it was a “good shooting.”

The truth is, it doesn’t matter if Kimani had a gun or a criminal record. It doesn’t matter whether the police said “Freeze” and “Don’t move,” or if they shot without warning.

What matters is that his death is the result of a system that allows police to frisk randomly and shoot with impunity, which critics say not only exacerbates the cycle of violence in East Flatbush, but might actually be creating it. What also matters, and is often missing from the conversation, is that it doesn’t have to be this way. The activists who have kept up nightly vigils at Kimani’s sidewalk memorial are voicing a hope: that his death will catalyze a movement to take on the most powerful police department in the world, and change forever the way laws are enforced.

A broken relationship

In the hair salons, Caribbean restaurants and grocery stores that line busy Church Avenue—near the corner where the shooting took place—residents spoke about their distrust, and often fear, of law enforcement. It’s a neighborhood where searches and arrests, often perceived to be unwarranted, are frequent, where young black men in particular are frequently “up against the wall.” Charles Petgrave, owner of Alco Shoes, said, “It’s always that we fear the cops.”

“We’re not animals,” said a young woman in a beauty supply store. “[The police] treat us like we’re nobody, but we’re all human,” she said. “I don’t think they act fairly in a black neighborhood.”

Kimani’s shooting coincides with increasing criticism of the NYPD’s controversial “stop and frisk” policy, which allows officers to search anyone at any time, given a reasonable suspicion of illegal activity. In practice, however, it translates into a pandemic of racial profiling, with five million searches in the last ten years, according to the New York Civil Liberties Union. In 2011 alone, the NYPD documented 700,000 stops. Of those stopped and searched, 87 percent were black or Latino; 90 percent yielded no evidence of any illegal activity.

Young men and boys march in East Flatbush to protest the shooting of Kimani Gray. Photo by the author.

The problem with “reasonable suspicion” is that it’s highly subjective, making it difficult to prove that a victim has been targeted because of race. That’s why the latest challenge to stop and frisk—a class-action suit that began last week, brought against the City of New York by the Center for Constitutional Rights—is potentially so important. Witnesses in the case have presented a substantial body of evidence suggesting that not only does profiling happen on a massive scale, but that it’s systematized and enforced from the top down through an illegal quota system, requiring officers to make at least twenty summonses and one arrest per month or face consequences.

“They want numbers at all costs,” testified officer and whistle-blower Adhyl Polanco. He described a pervasive culture of targeting black and Latino youth in order to meet the quota, sometimes without even a pretense of reasonable suspicion. He summarized the department’s attitude to the court this way: “Just ‘cuff him. We’ll make up the charge later.”

John Eterno, a veteran of the NYPD who now chairs the graduate program in criminal justice at Molloy College and has written numerous books on the subject, likens the current situation to “an army of occupation walking through the city.” Of particular concern to him is stop and frisk, which is “fanning the sparks and embers of community unrest from years and years of bad police-community relations.”

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“Not only is that bad in terms of constitutional law, it’s bad in terms of fighting crime,” Eterno says. Furthermore, his research shows that stop and frisk actually increases crime by alienating police from the neighborhoods they’re supposed to protect. “The police department cannot fight crime on their own. They need people to come to them, to help them.” Who would assist an investigation, he says, after being thrown up against a wall for no reason?

Many young people in East Flatbush have never lived in a place where they trusted the police. But older residents like Brooklyn native Yolanda Matthews, 58, remember a time when things were different. “When I was a child, you knew your beat cop,” says Matthews. “He’d talk to your mother, say, ‘I saw your kid go this way.’” When she and her friends played hopscotch, she says, a cop would jump in the game.

Matthews’ memory speaks to an alternative relationship between police and communities that once existed in these same neighborhoods. Eterno confirms that at one point “community policing” was indeed part of the strategy. It wasn’t perfect, he says, but was far better than the situation that exists now.

Back at his shoe store on Church Avenue, Charles Petgrave agreed that “we need to bond more with the police in the area. When we have community meetings, invite the commissioner, the people who patrol the street.” Jose LaSalle, an organizer with the community group Stop Stop and Frisk and one of the planners of Sunday’s march, envisions a future where police “treat people like human beings, not look at them like a criminal before they even know who these kids are.”

Pathways to better policing

But how do we get there? John Eterno’s recommendations echo those of many Flatbush residents on Church Avenue: First, he says, rein in stop and frisk to bring it in line with constitutionally protected rights. Second, strengthen police-community partnerships. Third, increase transparency. This means getting an independent Inspector General to check the police department’s power. “This is basic stuff,” Eterno says. “It should have already been there.

Candles and signed posters at the corner where nightly vigils are held for Kimani Gray. Photo by the author.

“In a democracy,” Eterno continues, “the police are on the front line.” They show us when our democracy’s working—or when it’s not. The NYPD is one of the largest and most influential police departments in the world, and its policies are a model for other police departments from Los Angeles to Paris. The changes that Eterno recommends, which community members also advocate, are not revolutionary—but their impact might be. If anything good comes out of Kimani’s death, it might be an opportunity to push for reforms in police policy that will reverberate far beyond New York City limits.

Meanwhile, candles still cluster around Kiki’s memorial on Church Avenue. The protest march is over. It’s dusk in East Flatbush, and a police car idles nearby. LaSalle and other activists still hope to keep up the nightly vigil, but they know the public’s attention is difficult to hold.

“My thing is just to keep what happened to these individuals alive in the people’s minds,” says LaSalle. “We try not to let people forget.”

Kristin Moe wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media project that fuses powerful ideas and practical actions. Kristin writes about climate, grassroots movements and social change. Follow her on Twitter @yo_Kmoe.

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Opponents of hydraulic fracturing rally in New York City. Photo by Adam Welz for CREDO Action.

Communities working to stop a controversial gas drilling process are getting what sounds like encouragement from an unlikely source: a report prepared for the oil and gas industry on the risks posed by those communities themselves. Even more bizarre than a risk assessment about grassroots activists is one that basically admits the activists are right.

The report assembles a wealth of information about fracking and the movement against it.

Control Risks, the global risk and strategic consulting firm that conducted the report, calls itself “independent,” but it makes its alliances clear in the first few sentences. Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, could bring “a golden age of cheap, plentiful energy for a resource-constrained world,” writes senior global issues analyst Jonathan Wood, “but only if it makes it out of the ground.”

Entitled “The Global Anti-Fracking Movement: What It Wants, How It Operates, and What’s Next,” the 2012 report uses the term “battlegrounds” to describe more than thirty countries on six continents where the issue of fracking is being debated. Its warnings about the dangers of ignoring the anti-fracking movement were likely a motivator behind last week’s so-called truce between four gas companies and a handful of environmental groups in the Appalachian Basin. Shell, Chevron, CONSOL Energy, and EQT Corporation joined with the Environmental Defense Fund, the Clean Air Task Force, and a few others to form the Center for Sustainable Shale Development. The Center will monitor the 15 environmental standards for fracking agreed upon by the alliance and will certify drilling operations that voluntarily comply with the standards.

Although the report is intended to provide gas companies with a plan for squashing the anti-fracking movement, people concerned about the environment or public health will find it worth reading for at least three reasons (besides entertainment). It contains reams of hard data about the movement, it identifies the tactics that have been most successful so far, and it ultimately backs up many of the movement’s key arguments.

The report assembles a wealth of information about fracking and the movement against it. It begins with a world map in which shale gas reserves are colored blue. This reveals huge stores of gas buried beneath areas such as Tibet, southern Brazil, Libya, and almost the entirety of South Africa. Just a glance gives a global perspective on what the anti-fracking movement is really up against.

In this still from Gasland, a documentary by Josh Fox, residential drinking water contaminated by fracking is set on fire. Image by Josh Fox.

A few pages later, there’s a chart measuring Google searches for the terms “fracking,” “shale gas,” and “Gasland”—the title of a 2010 documentary about natural gas drilling. The chart shows that before the release of the film, few people were searching for information about fracking. Only after a sharp spike in searches for the term “Gasland” is there a strong, steady rise in search activity for “fracking” and “shale gas.”

This helps to demonstrate just how important the film was in raising awareness about the process. Wood says it provided the movement with a shared point of reference, and claims that the movement wouldn’t have gone global without the documentary’s scenes of flaming water pouring from people’s faucets.

“They pretty much blame us for the whole thing,” said Gasland director Josh Fox. "Of course, I know that's not the whole story. The movement happened concurrently with a huge uprising of people.”

Praise for direct action

Wood goes on to describe other tactics, besides creating a fiery documentary, that have made anti-fracking activists so effective. Citing national fracking moratoriums in France and Bulgaria, as well as local bans and stricter drilling regulations worldwide, Wood claims the gas industry has “repeatedly been caught off guard by the sophistication, speed, and influence of anti-fracking activists.”

The report advises oil and gas companies to give anti-fracking activists much of what they’re asking for or risk having the process banned altogether.

John Armstrong, coordinator for the anti-drilling group Frack Action, has his own theory about why that is so. The anti-fracking movement “grew out of the grassroots—it wasn’t led by any national NGO but stemmed from regular working people who have never been activists before,” he says. “It is born out of children who have become ill, farms that have been ruined, aquifers and wells that have been contaminated, and air that has been poisoned.”

That grassroots urgency has often pushed the movement toward direct action, which Wood predicts will increase if demands for moratoriums and bans are not met. He identifies blockades of drilling operations, for example, as highly effective: "While the costs to activists of blockades are extremely low—both in terms of organization and penalties—the potential for disruption to the target can be significant in terms of lost productivity and extra operating costs."

Freedom to frack in four easy steps?

To avoid ever-increasing blockades and moratoriums, Wood advises gas companies to follow his four-step plan for quelling the anti-fracking movement: acknowledge local grievances, engage communities, work to reduce the damage fracking does to the environment, and “create more winners” (by which he means giving communities a fair share of the money from fracking). Wood also suggests that, “Movements towards greater transparency and voluntary disclosure, however grudging, are a positive step in this direction.”

Wood suggests gas companies simply pay off landowners, rather than go to court and have to admit they were at fault.

In other words, the report advises oil and gas companies to give anti-fracking activists much of what they’re asking for or risk having the process banned altogether. In doing so, Wood concedes that opponents of fracking are often right. He describes the “cozy relationships” the industry has with regulators and power-brokers, and the “crippling trust deficit” it has with citizens. He confesses there really is inadequate knowledge about the environmental, economic, and health impacts of fracking and that the industry has funded most of the studies that do exist, sometimes secretly.

Wood warns the industry to be more careful in its drilling practices because each well blowout and water contamination story makes the anti-fracking argument more compelling. When such incidents do occur, Wood suggests gas companies simply pay off harmed landowners and other citizens who file water contamination charges or other complaints, rather than go to court and have to admit they were at fault. This is not a new strategy—Wood cites a recent case where the industry did just that.

Finally, the report validates many activists’ claims that fracking doesn’t actually provide local communities with significant economic growth: fracking booms typically only supply local jobs for about two to three years.

Measuring momentum

After laying out this elaborate battle plan, Wood concludes with what activists may read as a challenge. The anti-fracking movement, he believes, “is grappling with the consequences of its successes, struggling to maintain momentum after winning tighter regulation, moratoriums and bans.”

Frack Action’s Armstrong disagrees, pointing to larger and more frequent rallies in New York. “Momentum is on our side, polls are on our side, the science and truth are on our side, and New Yorkers know that we are going to win.”

By winning, Armstrong means a statewide ban on fracking. New York, which he says has been the anti-fracking movement’s “catalyst,” currently awaits Governor Andrew Cuomo’s final decision on whether to lift the ban on fracking following a five-year moratorium. Forty-three percent of state residents oppose the process, while only 39 percent support it, according to a March Siena Poll, and the majority of both the state assembly and senate recently came out in favor of extending the moratorium.

Wood’s report is an attempt to use the industry’s resources—primarily money—to regain the upper hand in important decisions like this one. But, if studied closely, it could also help the anti-fracking movement plan its next steps.

Katrina Rabeler wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media project that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Katrina is a native New Yorker who wrote her senior thesis on hydraulic fracturing, and is an editorial intern at YES!

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Dolphins jump near the Navy ship USNS Rainier, a few miles off the coast of Southern California (Photo: Mass Communication Specialist, 3rd class, Mark Sashegyi).

California’s 840 miles of coastline boast an eclectic mix of marine habitats, from swaying kelp forests a hundred feet tall to wave-carved underwater cliffs and archways teeming with intertidal life. More than 285 species of fish are taken both commercially and recreationally here, supporting an industry worth upwards of $600 million each year.

The Navy’s plan would permit underwater detonations, ship sinkings, gunnery exercises, and active sonar offshore.

To protect these resources, the state’s legislature in 1999 passed the Marine Life Protection Act, the first of its kind in the United States. The law defines three different types of marine protected areas, directs the state to consider them together as a network, and sets up systems for minimizing human impacts within them.

But the act also includes a number of exceptions. Biological research and monitoring are exempt in some areas, as well as licensed fishing and collecting in others. So, too, are matters of national security—the U.S. Navy conducts underwater training exercises in or around several of the preserves established by the law. These exercises can be deadly to marine mammals such as whales, dolphins, and seals.

People who care about such animals have long had difficulty imposing limits on exercises operated by the U.S. Navy. “National security issues often seem to trump environmental issues,” says Miyoko Sakashita, oceans director at the Center for Biological Diversity in California.

But several signs suggest that may be changing. On March 8, the California Coastal Commission, a management agency created by state law, rejected a plan proposed by the U.S. Navy for sonar and explosive weapons training off the coast of Southern California, deeming it negligent and dangerous to marine life. And, while that decision is not binding, 500,000 signatures on an online petition were delivered to the commission requesting the rejection of the proposal.

This seems to show widespread support for the idea that the military needs to be more careful about how its activities affect ocean life.

Sounding off against the sonar plan

The California Coastal Commission's decision is merely advisory, and the National Marine Fisheries Service could still approve the Navy’s proposal. If that happens, the plan would permit underwater detonations, ship sinkings, gunnery exercises, and active sonar offshore, all of which are extremely loud and potentially deadly to whales and other marine creatures with sensitive hearing.

Stone says that the commission and the Navy agree on many of the “big picture” issues.

The proposal includes conducting activities that produce powerful underwater sound waves repeatedly over a five-year period—up to 9.5 million times in the Hawaii and Southern California training ranges, and 21.8 million times in the Atlantic training range.

This underwater ruckus can wreak havoc on a multitude of organisms, not just whales and dolphins, said Lyndia Storey of Whale and Dolphin Watch. “People are familiar with incidents around the world of cetaceans stranding themselves on beaches after sonar tests,” Storey said. “But there’s nothing in the [environmental impact statement] that covers plants, fish, algae—all of these things are affected by sound, possibly negatively.”

According to Martha McClure, supervisor of the California Coastal Commission, the number of “takes”—jargon for animals potentially injured, maimed, or killed by the tests—estimated in the Navy’s environmental impact statement was far too low. “A number of biologists working with us identified many more species that would be affected by these sounds, over quite a large area, and this was a huge stumbling block for us.”

A deep-sea cacophony

Underwater, sound waves move five times faster than they do through air, and because they lose less energy in water, they travel farther, too. These waves penetrate living tissue as well as water, and pass through an animal’s body like ripples through Jell-O.

At low volumes, sound waves are harmless, and in fact, whales and dolphins generate sounds of their own—clicks, whistles, even songs—to communicate and find food. Higher-frequency sound waves—such as those produced by dolphins—bounce off nearby objects in the water, and the rebounding echo helps the dolphins locate prey. This is called echolocation, nature’s precursor to sonar, and it is life-sustaining behavior for numerous marine species. Some of these cetacean sounds are rather loud: the blue whale’s call registers a whopping 188 decibels, louder than a jet engine.

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But even the blue whale’s song can be drowned out by sonar pings, some of which reach 230 decibels or higher. When the calls of whales and dolphins are drowned out, scientists believe they may be unable to find food or communicate with one another. A dolphin incapable of echolocating its prey may starve, and a disoriented whale separated from its pod might wander into an inlet or bay and strand itself in shallow water.

“It’s pretty well established that sonar noise affects marine life,” says Scott Veirs, a professor of oceanography at Beam Reach Marine Science and Sustainability School in Seattle. He points out that whales and dolphins hear in the middle range of sound frequencies, which are also the frequencies most likely to be drowned out by Navy sonar. “For an animal that relies on these sounds to hunt, to keep in touch with its group, sonar represents a big obstacle.”

Based on studies conducted by the Navy itself, some of these sound waves carry for immense distances—one wave registered 140 decibels, about as loud as a gunshot, 300 miles from its source.

One wave registered 140 decibels—about as loud as a gunshot—300 miles from its source.

Additionally, these intense bursts of sound can cause bubbles to form in the blood and tissues of marine mammals, leading to embolisms, hemorrhaging, and sometimes stroke. A particular form of sonar test, called the low frequency active signal, rapidly sweeps from low to high frequencies over its one-minute duration. The pulsating sound waves from the signal can resonate in animals’ skulls and in airspaces such as lungs and swim bladders, rupturing delicate tissues and sometimes causing disorientation and even death.

“Powerful mid-frequency sounds can temporarily or permanently deafen these animals, leaving them less able to find food, and sometimes leading them to strand themselves on beaches,” Veirs said. “What the Navy is requesting with [the consistency determination] is authorization for harassment.”

Finding accord in the dissonance

Many of those opposed to the Navy’s plan are seeking not to bar sonar tests entirely, but to mitigate the potentially harmful effects as much as possible. Sakashita of the Center for Biological Diversity said that a general acknowledgement of the Navy’s need to train is shared among the California Coastal Commission’s supporters. The commission, however, outlined “very specific criteria for mitigation,” she said, and many felt that the Navy’s plan too frequently fell short of them. These measures included limiting Navy testing and traffic within marine protected areas, testing for shorter periods of time, and avoiding tests when migratory species are present.

“We feel that the Navy should be able to do both: protect the country as well as the oceans,” Sakashita said.

A pod of orca whales surface as the USS Shoup, a Navy ship, uses mid-range sonar. Photo by Ken Balcomb.

The Navy, for its part, contends that the environmental impact of its practices has been fairly and adequately considered. “We spend a lot of time and energy developing an accurate assessment of the impacts, and in developing mitigation procedures that work,” said Alex Stone, the Navy’s project manager for the environmental impact statement. According to Stone, much of the controversy around the Navy’s proposal has to do with the difference between proven methods of keeping animals safe and other methods that remain at the conceptual stage.

Stone says that the commission and the Navy agree on many of the “big picture” issues, such as establishing safety zones that would be monitored for wildlife activity; if a pod of whales were detected in such an area, tests would be postponed until they left.

Working with the commission toward a compromise is in the Navy’s best interest, Stone said. “It’s a complex, difficult-to-understand issue. But we’ve had a history of working together on this, and I think that, conceptually, we’re in agreement.”

Strong support for sea mammal protection

Despite its advisory nature, Lynida Storey of Whale and Dolphin Watch says that the commission’s decision is an important one, not just for California but also for oceans worldwide. “It’s really re-energized awareness in this movement,” she said. “Navy sonar is deployed in 70 percent of the world’s oceans. Now people are saying, ‘You don’t have the right to destroy our oceans.’”

“I don’t think the Navy had a sense of the size of peoples’ response,” Storey said. “I had to email the signatures to the courthouse in 10,000-signature increments. That’s the largest they’d allow.”

And it’s not just the whales that are getting attention here—California’s Marine Life Protection Act represents pioneering legislation within the United States, and, according to Commissioner McClure, could eventually be replicated by any ocean-bordering nation in the world.

“As a kid, I would look out at the sea and imagine that there were all the fish in the world out there,” she said. “But now, of course, we’re recognizing that there is a need for protection. We have so many questions about what’s out there, how we’re affecting those places. So it’s important to take into careful consideration everything that we do to the oceans.”

Peter Pearsall wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Peter is an online reporting intern at YES! and a freelance science writer.

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