Conscious Choice: The Fires This Time

November 1995 | News of the Earth

The Fires This Time

by Mark Long

At a time when U.S. environmentalists seem to have their backs against the wall and to be losing every major battle on their many fronts, I can not help watching the international reaction to France’s resumption of nuclear testing in the South Pacific with some envy. As the international environmental and human rights organizations mobilized to pressure French President Chirac to reverse his decision to abrogate the three-year-old moratorium on nuclear testing, the people of "French Polynesia" did a little mobilizing of their own.

After the first test on the morning of September fifth, Tahiti’s independence movement nearly brought the whole colonial edifice of French control crashing down. Protests uniting opposition to the tests and in favor of independence from colonial rule took place throughout the region (there were 10,000 marchers in Tokyo), but the mayhem in the Tahitian capital of Papeete drew the world’s attention.

As 2,000 protesters gathered around the airport in the colonial capital of "French Polynesia" they began throwing rocks at the French military and colonial police behind the fence. As occupying forces are wont to do, the police responded with tear gas and truncheons; then all hell broke loose. When the smoke had cleared, the airport lay in ruins, along with many of the administrative offices of the French colonial administration; Papeete was under military control. An editorial in The Nation suggested that the airport was a logical target for the opposition, because it has served as a symbol of colonial rule since its construction. The airport was constructed in an attempt to expand Tahiti’s tourist trade and provide landing facilities advanced enough to administer to the needs of nuclear testing. To build it, French authorities filled Papeete’s lagoon, from which the population had drawn an important source of food. All of this "modernization," as it was called, destroyed the Maohi’s traditional lifestyle and forced them into the market economy. "In Tahiti, nuclear testing coincided with a‘development’ spree that paved the landscape, dispossessed throngs of Maohi, and hastened Polynesia’s transition from a subsistence economy centered on fishing, farming, and gathering to a cash system hooked on tourist dollars. Those who have lost their land or who can find no place in this scheme live in houses pieced together from junkyard parts, troll for poisoned fish off of yachting docks, and waste away behind the bric-a-brac of Kon Tiki culture" (October 23, 1995).

Needless to say, the resumption of tests and the fierce reaction to them has made France a pariah nation and Chirac an embattled President. Barely a few months into the "triumphant" return of conservative rule, Chirac is posting the lowest public opinion numbers of any President in the Fifth Republic, with an approval rating of just 39%. French displeasure with Chirac reflects both opposition to testing in general and a reaction to the heat which France has taken in the wake of such a needless project.

Chirac’s stated reason for the tests is the "urgent" need to develop simulation technologies as well as a new generation of warheads. Yet, with the demise of the cold war and increasing budget austerity at home the latter reason holds little water with the electorate. As to the former, the U.S. has offered to share its simulation technologies with France but Chirac has refused to accept the offer. This Gaullist emphasis on French independence seems to have worn thin at home.

Significantly, much of the domestic opposition to Chirac has been broadened and emboldened by the scope and intensity of the international reaction to the testing. Global environmental and human rights advocates can take some credit and much pleasure in Chirac’s quick fall from grace. Ten thousand demonstrators in Tokyo, Papeete in flames, and an international petition with 4 million signatures seem to have helped convince the French public that the new policy was misguided.

Nuclear testing and colonial rule are monumental issues against which to struggle. They occupy so much of the political landscape that they help to mobilize opposition by virtue of their sheer scope and the injustice which they represent. Here at home, conversely, since the end of the Vietnam war and the victories over Jim Crow in the civil rights movement, oppositional politics has been both demobilized and fragmented along lines of identity and "cause." What was once seen as a broad movement for social justice has devolved into fragmented efforts to win particular gains for partial efforts at reform. We are everywhere fighting to put out local brush fires while the country burns with intense heat around us.

Meanwhile, the forces of reaction are not so disheveled. They have mobilized effectively in a united cause to avenge "angry white males" and to attack government. Their unity and commitment to a grand cause has given the relatively small fringe of the far right a coherent platform for public consumption and a battle strategy that provides direction and purpose.

While we may not be fighting against so obvious an enemy as nuclear testing or colonial rule we need a grand vision that makes it clear that the battles we face are in fact linked. We must struggle against our own fragmentation and build bridges which unite our local fire brigades. For, in truth, it is the same ideological force that is now abolishing environmental regulation, attacking worker protection, and dismantling civil rights. All these issues represent battles in the same war, the outcome of which will determine who controls this country: ordinary citizens, through democratic institutions which limit and control the caprice of the market, or corporate elites in search of short-term profits.

At a time when the forces of reaction have limited access to the courts, taken over the legislature, and cowed the executive branch, there remain limited opportunities to defend democratic justice in institutional settings. As in Tahiti, the dispossessed eventually rely on the political arena that they know best and the fight returns to the streets (as well as the logging roads). As in Tahiti, the power of the people is always located in the actual or threatened withdrawal of compliance to business as usual.

This is not to say that we (in Chicago) have to burn O’Hare airport. As Thoreau, Gandhi, and King have already demonstrated, the withdrawal of consent does not have to take the form of the sacking of a city, though it does have to include a public display of intention. Just as people have taken to the streets in Papeete, so must we mobilize in public to oppose the dismantling of the post-war social contract that is taking place before our blinking eyes.

It is important to demonstrate to those in power and to the disheartened and disenfranchised that there is a significant segment of the population which opposes fattening the wealthy at the expense of the helpless and which will not sit idly by while it happens. Forest activists have already moved the battle back into the woods at Sugarloaf, Cove Mallard, and Cripps Bend by putting their bodies between that which they wish to save and the machines that would destroy it. We, too, must put our bodies on the line in defense of affirmative action, civil rights, workers rights, and the rights of the poor and elderly to a respectable standard of living, because these fights are not distinct. Anyone who can steal food from a hungry baby’s mouth or medical care from a poor grandmother can surely steal the tree out from under the nest of a spotted owl. If we are to maintain any hope of turning back this onrushing tide, we must find a vision and a voice of unity that can bring together the unique but fragmented forces for justice in our society. One million black men in the streets of Washington demanding little is not bad but, ten million black, red, brown, yellow, and white men and women in the streets demanding justice for all species—now there is a vision we can all enjoy.

Local (Northern Illinois)
• The National Forest Service has demonstrated once again that its mission is to serve the needs of the timber industry rather than to manage public lands for biological diversity. While waiting for a court to decide if a pending cut in the Cripps Bend area of the Shawnee National Forest was a violation of the Endangered Species Act because of the presence of the Indiana bat, the National Forest Service and the local logging company decided to make the legal case a moot point by removing the trees in question. Local forests activists (see "Clearcut: Our Nation’s Forests in Peril"; Conscious Choice, Sep/Oct 1994) did what they could to save the unique stand that was Cripps Bend by engaging in civil disobedience and raising public awareness, but the massive police presence and the criminalization of protest—through the cordoning off of public land to protect private interests—made stopping the cut impossible. What meager mature forest is left in this state is now up for grabs. The Clinton administration’s commitment to "get the cut out" and the 104th Congress’ attack on our nation’s forests leaves little room for hope for the Indiana bat or the biologically diverse ecosystems which support it.

National
• In a cowardly move typical of the 104th congress the Republican leadership has used the budget process to overturn years of environmental regulation that they do not have the guts or clout to challenge head on. By burying "regulatory relief" in the budget process, the current leadership of the Party of Lincoln is betting that Clinton will lack the political backbone to veto the already late budget bill out of fear of the public backlash that would result from brining non-essential government services to a halt. Leaving the President only the options of signing the bill into law or vetoing it, Republicans are banking on its passage to win some of the following changes in environmental regulation: prohibition on listing any new hazardous waste sites; a repeal of the current moratorium on new mining permits; opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for oil drilling; creating a National Park closure commission (a bill so odious that it has already been defeated in the rabidly anti-environment House); specifically increasing logging in the Tongass National Forest in Alaska; prohibiting the EPA from issuing standards to protect citizens from arsenic, radon and cryptosporidium, prohibiting new listings of endangered species or their habitat, etc., ad nauseam. Optimistically speaking, this could be a defining moment of Clinton’s reign, in which our bewildered hero discovers that he has both a conscience and skeletal system and vetoes this end-run around the democratic process. "If these buffoons want to wage war against government," he could reason, "then let’s see where the public really stands when governmental services shut down." Realistically, it will be another public chest puffing followed by capitulation to the corporate agenda in the guise of bi-partisan compromise.

• The boom in light truck sales in the U.S. over the past ten years has decimated the gains in fuel efficiency for cars that resulted from government imposed CAFE standards. The ratings of the US car fleet have jumped from 18 mpg in 1978 to 28.2 today (which is, incidentally, above the mandated level of 27.5). Shamefully, truck ratings have actually fallen since 1983 and their popularity (4 out of 10 passenger vehicles sold) has brought total fleet mileage down from a high of 26.2 in 1987 to 24.8 in 1995. This is possible because auto CAFE standards do not apply to trucks. President Clinton is considering raising the CAFE standards on trucks but faces stiff opposition from the Big Three. Let him know that there is citizen support for his effort.

International
• When the U.S. government patent office issued patent number 5,397,696 it embarked on a new level of neo-colonial exploitation by granting a patent on the genetic material of an indigenous person from Papua New Guinea. The patent is the result of research from the Human Genome Diversity Project (HGDP) on the unique life structure of a man of the remote Hagahai people who came into significant contact with the outside world in 1984. The motive for seeking a patent on another person’s DNA "fingerprint" was made clear recently when a German firm purchased similar research for $70 million. That market relations have permeated every pore of our social being has been obvious for some time. That this process has finally locked up the DNA structure which accounts for individual human uniqueness has sobering, Orwellian ramifications. (I wonder if this man, if he has a child, can be sued for patent infringement for unauthorized reproduction of his DNA?)

• Remember the Canadian raid on a Spanish fishing trawler in international waters off of the coast of Newfoundland? (NOTE May/June 1995) It seems that the Canadian government is trying to put Paul Watson, founder of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society in prison for life for taking the same action on a trawler two years earlier. The only difference is that, while Watson never engaged in any physical contact with the crews of the fishing vessels, the Canadian Navy fired on, rammed, and captured the trawlers they were pursuing. Watson faces life in prison for his peaceful actions—if he is convicted on the two counts of "Criminal Mischief" and one count of endangering his crew (in spite of the fact that the crew is testifying for the defense). To help with the defense fund contact Sea Shepherd at 3107A Washington Blvd., Marina del Rey, CA 90292, 310-301-7325.

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