As an editor and reporter for Random Lengths News in San Pedro, I've been covering port issues since 2002. When I began, there were just a handful of activists who'd been carrying on the struggle for clean air in San Pedro--some for decades, some for several years--and there were some fledgling developments in nearby communities. Five years later, there was an national conference held in nearby Carson, with hundreds of activists from across the country from port communities and communities impacted by the goods movement that flows inland from the ports--primarily along rail lines. Yesterday and today there's another conference, this time with activists from Russia, China, Malaysia, Panama and Australia as well.
This is all the work of The Trade, Health & Environment Impact Project (THE Impact Project) which describes itself as "a collaboration of community and university partners focused on reducing the impacts of trade, ports and goods movement activities on health and community life." More on the conference to come, but I'm pretty busy right now. I just wanted to share this video, which is the product of "New Voices Are Rising", a program in the Bay Area for training high school students in affected communities to become the next generation of environmental justice leaders. Goods movement is closely tied into global warming, and there's an initiative on the ballot here in California that would undo our global warming law. Students from one of the high schools involved created this video:
Two things happened this past week that were both significant in themselves, and worth connecting to one another. First, New Jersey repealed the death penalty (Gov. Corzine has yet to sign it, but has announced that he will). Second, the US effectively sabotaged the post-Kyoto global warming process in Bali. What connects these two events is how they illustrate the effectiveness of conservative hegemony, the ability to define the basic terms of debate, the parameters of common sense.
The civilized world has abolished the death penalty. The United States, which once had the most humane criminal justice system in the world, now has one of the most barbaric. We are second only to China and, well, we now are Iraq, I'm sorry, I haven't kept up with these things like I should have. No executions are present because we're under a temporary moratorium, but death rows continue growing, so it's hard to know just which metrics make sense to apply, but suffice it to say, we're not civilized, and we're proud!
There's just two things: (1) The death penalty doesn't deter murder. (2) Murder is not nearly the threat to human life that environmental destruction is. Conservatives have done an incredibly effective job of steamrolling over these basic facts, and that job of steamrolling is the real subject of this brief diary.
I'm not going to be able to comment today until late afternoon, West Coast time. I'll be at day two of this conference...
"Birth of a movement" is probably overstating it. Movements don't really work like that. They come into being gradually, almost imperceptibly at first, and then go through succession of defining moments, not just one. But sometimes there comes a moment when those who have been acting separately in far-flung corners of the country come together, and know that from that point onward, they will never be that separate again. And that is not the birth a movement, it is, at least, the birth of a movement's national identity. And that is what is happening in Carson, California, this Friday and Saturday: the joining together of activists from across the country fighting to defend their communities against the destructive side of global trade in perhaps its most concrete form-the destruction due to the physical movement of goods.
There were also some world-class health and environmental scientists on hand. You know. Reality-based community types. The usual suspects.
Modestly billed as "a conference on healthy solutions for communities impacted by trade, ports and goods movement," the "Moving Forward" conference brought people from communities as far away as Maine-and even Barcelona-to the shadow of the Los Angeles/Long Beach port complex, which claims more than a thousand lives a year due to premature deaths from the pollution generated by the flow of goods pouring through it. Although the vast majority of participants came from different parts of California, others came not only from Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico ports, but also from "inland ports" in places as unlikely as rural Kansas, where Eric Kirkendall found himself threatened with being surrounded by a massive, multi-acre, diesel-pollution-belching warehouse complex. And they came not so much for raw information-readily available in today's online age-but for the chance to simply gather together, share their stories, gain inspiration, make connections, and forge the framework for a movement that still does not even have a simple name.
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