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Keisha E. McKenzie | communication | systems | social good

environmental justice

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For the beauty of the Earth

Without a deep, deep understanding of the sacredness of life, the fragility of each breath, we are lost. —ChrystosI haven’t lived anywhere I’m more conscious of “the fragility of each breath” than New York City.

The density of traffic fumes and tobacco clouds, and occasionally the pungent odor of marijuana, too—all of these pollutants make it easy to notice my breath and the quality of air I’ve taken for granted until now.

When I get back to Maryland and stand on the grass and breathe in deeply, fresh air means something new to me, something extraordinarily precious. We need to hold that quality of attention to the world we’re part of, and we need to do it consistently.

The US government’s latest executive orders, perversely signed today at the Environmental Protection Agency, include lowering power plant emissions targets, and continuing investment in fossil fuels: we’re going to keep burning, keep piping, and keep warming this planet for at least the next four years (likely the next eight).

And the United States’ new policies are being justified in the name of a profitable energy industry. They assume this country has only a limited impact on the ecosystem beyond its political borders. These policies are an effective denial that we have the responsibility to care and act in favor of “the sacredness of life,” that we’re not just accountable to private, corporate advantage.

I recently saw a social media post of still pictures from an un-credited documentary. In three frames, an indigenous person explains nature’s generosity:

“Nature gives us everything for free. Nature doesn’t charge us any money. All nature asks of us is that we protect it,” they say.

But it’s only partly true. Nature doesn’t charge but changing the status quo will cost us all, and it will cost us the longer we wait to start.

Read Vox’s explainer to understand the full scope of the new executive rules.

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An update on #NoDAPL

From way down the lawn: the United States White House. The trees are full; and the sky is bright and clear. It must be summer.
Photo credit: Srikanta

“Elections have consequences.” That’s the Told Ya So of 2017: annoying and yet valid.

Among the consequences: the AP reports that the acting US Army Corp chief has authorized resumption of the Dakota Access Pipeline project. Construction is moving forward yet again, over the objections of the Standing Rock Tribe and coalitions like the Indigenous Environmental Network.

(A transnational pipeline expansion project, Keystone XL, will transport Canadian tar sands oil from Oh, Canada to Texas, Our Texas by way of Nebraska. The previous federal administration reviewed it for six years before failing to advance it.)

I’ve written about this energy construction project several times over the last six months. I’ve never been to South or North Dakota. I’m not part of the indigenous community, and I only started paying attention to climate change and energy politics a few years ago.

I still came to follow and care about the pipeline project and several of the Native communities who’ve mobilized against it because of its route through unceded Sioux land.

I’ll keep sharing updates on this pipeline until it’s stopped (ideal) or operational (increasingly more likely).

In the meantime, follow and help to fund the IEN, and take action with the Standing Rock community.

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News from Michigan, Alabama, and Russia

A common thread of resistance and environmental racism links Flint, Michigan, Standing Rock Reservation, North Dakota, and Waller County, Texas, where residents are fighting, respectively, state negligence, corporate encroachment, and an unwanted landfill.

Phillip Luke Sintierre writes on the proposed landfill in Waller County for the African American Intellectual History Society:

Opposition to Green Group’s landfill proposal on the grounds of environmental racism relates to the work of environmental justice activist Benjamin Chavis, who defines environmental racism as “the deliberate targeting of people-of-color communities for hazardous waste facilities, such as landfills and incinerators, and the siting of polluting industries. [Environmental racism] is racial discrimination in the official sanctioning of the life-threatening presence of poisons and pollutants in communities of color.” —Phillip Luke Sintierre, December 18, 2016

For the LA Times, Ivan Perry reports on a town in Alabama where residents have faced an eight-year battle with state officials after a sulfur compound leaked into their soil and groundwater.

Residents of Bismarck, ND, were able to refuse the Dakota Access Pipeline but the residents of Standing Rock Reservation still have to warily eye pipeline construction lights and equipment. Last year, Porter Ranch, CA, suffered a methane leak and the state responded by evacuating residents until the leak had been plugged. Residents of Eight Mile, AL, have received no comparable consideration:

‘Our sense of smell is acutely sensitive to mercaptans,’ Jackson said. ‘They’re irritants. They irritate our eyes. They’re designed to smell bad, to be unpleasant.’

Dr. Jeffrey Nordella, an urgent care physician in Porter Ranch, said he has been conducting his own research on mercaptan’s health effects since the Aliso Canyon leak.

‘Mercaptan is toxic to the human body,’ Nordella said. ‘The question is exposure — how much and for how long?’ … The years of troubles in Eight Mile have led some residents to pack up and move. But most of the 3,000 residents don’t have the resources to leave.” —Ivan Perry, October 15, 2016

In the Detroit Free Press, Ryan Garza leads a multi-media appeal on behalf of Flint, Michigan, whose residents still don’t have drinkable tap water and just rebuffed the state’s attempt to stop delivering bottled water.

Don’t forget about Flint. It’s a sentiment we’ve heard since the national media and presidential campaigns swept through this city in crisis. As we approach 2017, the three-year anniversary of the start of Flint’s water crisis, it bears repeating.

Don’t forget what the people of Flint must do for clean water. Many are still using cases of bottled water to cook with, bathe in and drink.” —Ryan Garza, December 17, 2016

Finally, climate communicator Alex Steffen explores key influences on carbon policy, the climate change denial that will likely be a major part of the next US federal administration, and corporate construction of new carbon-fuel infrastructure like the Dakota Access Pipeline. There’s a gap, Steffen writes, between how much items like oil and beachfront property are worth today and how sustainable they are in the long-run. He calls this gap “the carbon bubble.”

If we can’t burn oil, it’s not worth very much. If we can’t defend coastal real estate from rising seas (or even insure it, for that matter), it’s not worth very much. If the industrial process a company owns exposes them to future climate litigation, it’s not worth very much. The value of those assets is going to plummet, inevitably… and likely, soon...

For high-carbon industries to continue to be attractive investments, then, they must spin a tale of future growth. They must make potential investors believe that even if there is a Carbon Bubble, it is decades away from popping — that their high profits today will continue for the foreseeable future, so their stock is worth buying.” —Alex Steffen, December 15, 2016

Researchers Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway have written extensively about how public campaigns of science denial have worked, not just on climate change but also on tobacco, DDT, and acid rain. Read or watch their work and note how corporations and their think tank partners are using the same playbook on environmental and climate issues today.

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From encampment to divestment

A dream catcher flies in the air. The sky behind it is light blue. There's a sun flare in the center of the image.
Photo credit: Dyaa Eldin

As winter sets in the Dakotas and the government begins an environmental impact study of the proposed Dakota Access Pipeline, a coalition of Native people at and around Standing Rock is weighing its options.

Should non-Natives leave the area or stay, ready to intervene? Should activists focus on Energy Transfer Partners and its ongoing construction of another section of DAPL in Iowa, or lobby the national banks that are funding the project? These aren’t easy questions, but the right answer is probably “Yes.” Complex problems often require many people pressing forward on several fronts at once.

This week, days after the announcement that the pipeline company would not receive the easement permit it applied for, the Standing Rock coalition has published a new statement on the road ahead. The coalition at Standing Rock includes the Indigenous Environmental Network, the International Indigenous Youth Council, Honor the Earth, and the Sacred Stone Camp. And they have a very specific ask:

We ask you to join us in an unprecedented divestment campaign to kill the black snake financially.  We will also ask you to engage in the development of the Environmental Impact Statement to the extent that the public is invited to participate, and guide you through that process.  But let us use this time to cut off funding for the project.  December is an international month of action focused on the 17 banks that are profiting off investments in the Dakota Access pipeline.  Shut these banks down with direct action.  Close your accounts and tell the world you’re doing it.  Pressure your local jurisdictions and philanthropists to divest.  Every day is a day of action… Now more than ever, we ask that you stand with us as we continue to demand justice.” (December 9, 2016)

Read the rest of the statement and take this weekend to discern what action is yours to take.

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Water is life, we say.

It's a profusely cloudy day. The Flint Water Plant looms into the air. In the foreground are yellow-green grasses and a dark brown-grey wooden slat fence.
Flint, MI’s water plant tower. Photo credit: Jeanette Hoyer

There’s some good news from Standing Rock this week: good in the way that mere bureacracy always looks heroic when set beside rank cruelty and neglect.

The US Army Corps has agreed to prepare an environmental impact statement on the proposed Dakota Access Pipeline otherwise known as DAPL. This impact statement, as Natives have said for months, should have been prepared before Energy Transfer Partners ever gained license to reroute the pipeline away from Bismarck, ND, and begin construction through treaty lands and, potentially, under the Missouri River.

Tribal chairman David Archambault has asked that those “standing with Standing Rock” leave Oceti Sakowin Camp and return home now. Veterans only just joined water protectors in the snow this weekend.

On Sunday, the Army Corps of Engineers denied a permit for the 1,172-mile pipeline to cross under a dammed section of the Missouri River just north of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation. The river crossing is the last major piece of the pipeline that remains unfinished.” —Rebecca Hersher (December 5, 2016)

So there’s a reprieve now, but there’s also the issue of the pipeline project still being live. A week and a half ago I read one of the Standing Rock Tribe’s statements and wondered whether its goal had shifted from “No” to “NIMBY,” from stopping the pipeline to merely moving it to some other community. I hope it hasn’t shifted in that way.

In the meantime, some of the veterans who went to Standing Rock are now planning to move on to Flint, MI, where residents haven’t had safe drinking water for more than two and a half years.

This isn’t the final chapter by any means, regardless of the government’s single decisions in this case. Because if water is life, then it’s worth protecting for all of us, everywhere, not only where the money flows and not only when the cameras are on.

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The latest from Standing Rock

A view of Standing Rock under a huge blue sky.
Photo credit: Standing Rock Medic and Healer Council

The story of the Dakota Access Pipeline continues:

The pipeline is planned from Bakken oil fields of North Dakota to Illinois, where it would tie in with an existing pipeline to refineries in the Midwest and on the Gulf coast.

The project was never examined under an environmental impact review but instead was approved under a fast-track process that three federal agencies have stated was not adequate.” —Lynda V. Mapes, November 25, 2016

A neighboring town, Bismarck, ND, also rejected the Dakota Access Pipeline over pollution risks before the company approached the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and the Tribe rejected it too.

This weekend, the Army Corps of Engineers informed the Standing Rock Sioux that it planned to close public access to the Oceti Sakowin camp, a site where thousands of Native and non-Native water protectors have gathered over the last several months. Tribal chairman David Archambault, Jr. published a response this morning on the Standing Rock Sioux website:

Our Tribe is deeply disappointed in this decision by the United States, but our resolve to protect our water is stronger than ever. We ask that all everyone who can appeal to President Obama and the Army Corps of Engineers to consider the future of our people and rescind all permits and deny the easement to cross the Missouri River just north of our Reservation and straight through our treaty lands. When Dakota Access Pipeline chose this route, they did not consider our strong opposition. Our concerns were clearly articulated directly to them in a meeting on Sept. 30, 2014. We have released that audio recording from our council meeting where DAPL and the ND Public Service Commission came to us with this route…

We ask that the United States stop the pipeline and move it outside our treaty lands.” —David Archambault, Jr., November 26, 2016

Three people in my network have joined camps at the Standing Rock Reservation, and several more in my extended network are reading for winter there. Excessive local police force has been all over the headlines, and rightly so. But state violence is the easiest story to tell because, as Archambault writes, it’s so common, so continuous with the history of the US and its dealings with Native peoples.

EarthJustice’s legislative counsel Raul Garcia tells a simpler, less sexy story of Native and non-Native people gathering at Standing Rock out of shared spiritual conviction, not just common political belief.

Even when we were talking about politics, the sacredness of it all was what tribe members conveyed as important. The respect of the people overcame any thought of animosity, and the solemnity of the place and the need to protect nature inspired peaceful unity. This indigenous vision of sacred air, sacred water and sacred land was striking to me. I live in Washington, D.C., where polarized rhetoric dominates the landscape, and where, since the presidential election season, distasteful attacks are rampant. Visiting the camps and understanding the spirituality driving this struggle against corporate profit was an eye-opening and humbling experience.” —Raul Garcia

All of the camps and the medical council still need material support, and as Dr. Adrienne Keene has said, “money might be best.” Please give what you can.