Sandra Finley

2007-11-07 GOAL: the percentage of children under age 5 with fetal alcohol effect decreases from a current level of XX% to YY% by the year 2015.

 Health  No Responses »
Nov 072007
 

 Politics is public service.  It is (ummm-  SHOULD be) a noble calling that requires us to go beyond ourselves. 

Some of us ran in the election.  The Green Party aspires to a leadership role in government.  Sometimes you don’t have to get elected; you can still make a difference by putting the issues forth.

Jane Jacobs, in her book “Systems of Survival.  A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics” makes it clear that leadership comes from the top down.  It is not the fault of “the family” or the failure of parenting if morals are in decline.  It is the fault of the leadership in the community. 

We are all leaders, in different ways, in our communities. In small ways.

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 The President of Uganda, Museveni, will not attend any function at which alcohol is served.  He knows the value of role models.  Uganda doesn’t have the problems with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome that Saskatchewan has.  

GOAL:  the percentage of children under age 5 with fetal alcohol syndrome decreases from a current level of XX%  to  YY% by the year 2015.   

If the number of children with Fetal Alcohol Effect continues to grow, we know that our programmes are ineffective.  Someone is responsible and accountable for that.

(Excerpts from March 4, 2002  Verbal and written submission to Romanow Healthcare Review.) 

We have developed a research and treatment industry around children with FAS. 

Every child born with FAS is testament to our failure.  With the right measurements and accountability, we can begin to reverse the trend. 

===================  

(from my Submission to Romanow Healthcare Review) 

10.         Alcohol and Addictions 

Addictions are known to be terribly costly to society.   Healthcare expenditures are ever-increasing. 

Use the example of Saskatchewan.  Saskatoon Star Phoenix Feb 21, 2002:   “…revenue shortfall over $150 million”. 

The Government knows that tax hikes will be extremely unpopular.  Is it coincidental that I read in another newspaper where Premier Calvert announces 400 new video lottery terminal licenses will be issued?  

In conversation with Robert Ducan, Mayor of the small town of Val Marie (remembered among other things for organizing a road crew of local citizens to fix their own roads; the roads had fallen into intolerable disrepair) he lamented about some of the residents who couldn’t stay away from the VLT’s and the harm that was doing to their family finances, which in turn affects the health of the family.  He asked one of the ranchers,  “What would your reaction be if we were able to shut down the VLTs in the town?”  (If you know and care about the individuals in a community,  you want to help them.) 

The man’s shame-faced response was, “Great.  If I had to drive an hour to get to one, I wouldn’t be doing it, or at least not nearly so much.”  What do VLTs contribute to the life and health of the individual community? 

“Beyond the Influence: Understanding and Defeating Alcoholism“, Ketchum and Asbury, April 2000, establishes that addictions are an illness.  The man that Robert Ducan talked with, or the lawyer that has a “drinking problem”, have more than a lack of self-discipline.  Addictions come in different forms, to gambling, to alcohol, to shopping, etc.  Some forms are more destructive than others.  It is also established that if you merely shut down (as opposed to working on the cause of) an addiction it will most often surface in the individual, later, in another form.  Understood in this light, in the VLTs there is an element of preying on the weaknesses of another person.  

A fellow in the banking business in the town of Kerrobert shook his head and said, “You wouldn’t believe the amount of money that goes out of this town to the (government) lotteries.  Thousands of dollars out of individual bank accounts.”  In small towns a bank manager knows the people and sees where the money goes. 

I spoke with Maxine Wiebe from the Central Plains Health District (Humboldt).  The Humboldt Journal stated that in 1997 $1,300,786 left the area through VLT’s.  One year.  I don’t have the updated figures. 

The existing system is actually very destructive of community, and therefore of health:  the Government siphons the money out of communities where it is needed to fund the maintenance and building of facilities such as skating rinks and swimming pools that contribute greatly to the health of a community (kids and families engaged in healthy pursuits).  Money given directly to local volunteer organizations has a great deal more purchasing power than the same dollars sent in to a central bureaucracy where it is used to pay the salaries and overhead of people to whom the municipality must then submit written plans in order to get the money back to do the community work,  IF some one in Regina deems the project desirable. 

Through the siphoning off of money through Income Taxes (Federal, Provincial), consumption taxes (GST, PST), and gambling revenues, communities become dependent.  And they lose control over the decisions that affect the work that will be done in their community.  

85-year-old Jane Jacobs, author whose works are taught in many different university courses, began meeting with the mayors of 5 major Canadian cities in the summer of 2001.  Their work is based on Jacobs’ premise that the present system whereby the Federal Government rakes in the tax booty and the municipalities then beg hat-in-hand from the mandarins for alms is ludicrous.  Cities don’t have money for public transportation, sewage treatment (Halifax, Victoria, Vancouver dump untreated sewage complete with toxic industrial effluent into waterways), Regina doesn’t have money for garbage disposal, Humboldt doesn’t have money to fund local economic development. The answer is for ALL municipalities to join the 5 major Cities that are negotiating a re-balance with Ottawa. 

Communities can compete with the Government for the money and many do:    local service organizations raffle, for example, airfare to Hawaii for two to raise funds for the community hall.  A much larger portion of the money stays in the community.  Local people decide what the community needs and they grow strong as they work together and see the fruits of their joint labour.   

It is clear to me that the people of Saskatchewan, and especially people in the health professions, should boycott the Government’s attempts to extend gambling.  The relationship between healthy communities and healthy individuals is well known.  Oh yes, we all know that.  But our actions don’t support our empty and meaningless rhetoric. 

Peter Gzowski contributed to the book “Addicted:  Notes from the Belly of the Beast” edited by Lorna Crozier and Patrick Lane 2001 (Gzowski was killed by his addiction to cigarettes).  Moving personal stories of writers and poets who have gone public with their experience.  An all too- common theme is  abuse of the person as a child in one sad way or another.  Also drinking that started at a young age (adults giving booze to very young children). 

You either want to cry or string somebody up.  (I don’t know the biographies of all 10 Canadian contributors to the book, but at least 3 of them are from Saskatchewan (Lois Simmie, Lorna Crozier and John Newlove).  Hopefully that’s a bias introduced by Lorna Crozier who edited the book, and not a consequence of the higher levels of alcoholism in Saskatchewan. 

I think of a friend from a Saskatchewan town.  Alan was given his first drink at age 8 and was known for his partying by his teens.  Father was a drinker who beat his children.  Alan quit school and headed for the city at the first opportunity.  This gifted and generous individual did well and made it onto the list of Canada’s top ten business people one year, in spite of his drinking.  His life today is a daily struggle to remain sober. Sometimes on the wagon, sometimes off. (UPDATE:  2007:  Alan is 61 years old and hasn’t much longer to live.  . . .   He’s dead.) 

What existed side-by-side with the neglect and abuse of the child was a community that chose not to see, that chose not to help the child.  A worker hired by the Government, sitting in an office will never know what goes on in back alleys and behind closed doors.  But people in the community know.  

Among my Grandfather’s old newspaper clippings was a letter-to-the-editor from one Arch Winegarden in Saskatoon.  He wrote “In the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, written in 1788 by Edward Gibbons, five basic reasons why that civilization withered and died, are stated thus:

“…. when the real reason was within – the decay of individual responsibility.” 

We as citizens are part of the problem, and the Government is part of the problem.  The attitude developed has been:  the Government will look after it:  turn all the money over to them.  But they can’t carry out our responsibilities and they don’t.  We move backwards.  

The cost of addictions (alcohol, gambling, etc.) on healthcare costs (let alone in other fields) is well documented.  Alcohol is a factor in half the admittances to emergency rooms.  People are treated for the injury, discharged, and once again  the system does not address cause.  The problem is alcoholism, not a broken nose from getting in a fight.   Anyone that comes into an emergency room with alcohol-related injuries should be diverted directly into an alcohol-related programme.  

I have spoken with the Drug and Alcohol Addiction Centre in Regina.  They are greatly under-funded.  A friend in Regina whose husband developed a gambling problem phoned the gambling addiction help line in Regina to obtain the package of information promised to families that face gambling problems.  She was told it would take two weeks before the information would get to her.  (I can send a message to Uganda in minutes.  It takes 2 weeks to get a package across town in Regina.)  The wife of the addicted person was highly anxious.  You don’t wait two weeks to deal with crisis situations.  In spite of all the rhetoric we have very ineffective programmes related to addictions.   

There are effective models to combat the horrendous effects of addiction (reference the above book – “Beyond the Influence).  Other jurisdictions implement alcohol programmes at great saving to the medical system.   We don’t need to re-invent the wheel  – – couldn’t we at least recognize value and adopt it?  It is unacceptable that Saskatchewan should have a high per capita rate of alcohol consumption. Not when we have Fetal Alcohol Syndrome babies. 

In the long term health-care costs will remain unnecessarily high if we don’t adopt more effective programming.   We need a specific target (e.g. Saskatchewan will have the lowest rate of alcohol consumption in Canada by 2010), a strategy to accomplish that, and regular assessment of progress.

We need LONG TERM plans.  

Included in the assault on alcoholism should be an assault on the alcohol industry, the same as there has been on the tobacco industry.  

I wonder if a group of fetal alcohol syndrome people will take somebody to court one day?  But in the interests of healthcare, I challenge you to tell me why it is not the responsibility of Government to implement effective programmes?   They match Monsanto $1 for $1 to help the company develop transgenic wheat, with the added bonus of access to Federal laboratory facilities.  Meanwhile they continue to contribute to the problem of addictions through the extensions of gambling and through negligence in relation to the policing of alcohol consumption (which generates more revenues for them).  “Beyond the Influence …” documents the effectiveness of the industry lobby, and the lack of uncompromised politicians.   The industry has bought and continues to buy itself into a position where no one will challenge their presence.   

Free beer for underage teen-agers at the Rock Festival in Craven.  Many, many examples of the acceptance of the alcohol culture, when it should be aggressively weeded out.  

The Temperance Society in Saskatoon just after the turn-of-the-century made a large difference in alcohol consumption.  Women in the community cared about the women and children who were going without food while the money went to the bottle to be passed out in urine.  Today we have less incentive to address the problems created by alcohol addiction because the women and children will be looked after by social assistance.  Is that really an answer?  We are once again in need of a Temperance Society. 

When I attended the University of Saskatchewan in the late sixties it was not possible to buy alcohol on the east side of the River because the land for the university was endowed by a woman who set a condition: there could be no alcohol available for sale on the side of the River where the land for the University was situated.  Her terms were honoured for many decades.  Students still got beer, to be sure, but they went to a few pains to get it. 

Eventually the City found a way around the by-laws and booze was available on the East side, off-campus.  And eventually the University and the liquor sellers got around the lady’s wishes altogether.  Today there is a pub on campus. And initiation into the booze cult. 

The President of Uganda, Museveni,  will not attend any function at which alcohol is served, simply because he knows the value of role models.  Uganda doesn’t have the problems with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome that Canada has. 

Recommend:

Not one penny of money raised through taxation should be used to purchase alcohol; it doesn’t matter how “dignified” the state functions or visitors are.  We need a strong stand and a visible role model that says “you can choose not to drink”.  

Also, I don’t think it’s fair that families who themselves can’t afford a bottle of wine for dinner should have to provide the money (through taxation) to buy the wine and other spirits that are served at innumerable Government functions across the country, free-of-charge to the participants, all of whom can afford to buy their own booze. 

Saskatchewan’s national standing on alcohol consumption is a sign of incompetence, a sign that Saskatchewan is not progressive, a cause for embarrassment, a sign that we do not have effective programmes.

2007-11-03 The Need for Helpful Economic Indicators

 Economic Indicators  No Responses »
Nov 032007
 

It is important to understand the role that economic indicators are playing.

If the following rings true to you, please consider passing it along.

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A New Economic Model

Our ways of recording economic growth prevent us from creating a healthy society. Our current system of measuring a successful economy is to report each expense or product as a unit of economic growth.

Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is reported as a success regardless of its effect on public health or the natural environment.

If a new hospital is built for children because of the rising number of children with cancer, asthma and developmental problems, that is economic growth.

If we pay a million dollars to treat a person for cancer, we have economic growth.

If there is clean-up after a large spill in a uranium mine, this creates employment, consumes goods, and is measured as economic growth.

In our society “Growth” is seen as success.

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In this system, a corporation is required to pay for its internal operating costs only.

If it depletes or pollutes the water supply, it is allowed to avoid these “external” costs.

Expenses resulting from environmental degradation, including health costs are paid for by ordinary citizens from the public purse.

Yet it is recorded as “economic growth”.

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Safeguarding our Natural Heritage

In the early 1980’s the lakes in northern Saskatchewan were healthy.

Today, lakes in Northern Saskatchewan are dying, as reported in the spring publication from the Canadian Council of Ministers of the Environment (CCME).

Despite the consequences of the sulphur dioxide and nitrous oxide emissions from tar sands developments, there are proposals to increase production in Alberta and to develop the tar sands in Saskatchewan.

Acid rain from petro-chemical projects in Ontario and Quebec is a well-known outcome of the work of Suncor and other transnational corporations. Abnormal birth statistics, cancers and other problems created by their operations in the corridors from Sarnia to Windsor and London is currently in the news.

When the exploitation of resources is complete, the transnationals will return to the U.S., Europe and Asia with their profits, leaving us with the ill health effects and badly damaged land and water.

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Creating a Healthy Society

“I am saddened by the deaths of my friends from cancer,” …. “Two of my brothers have also died from cancer; they all worked in the uranium mines.”

By allowing corporations to pollute in the name of economic growth (falsely-measured), we are allowing health risks and environmental damage to continue and to escalate.

Both ruling and opposition parties have failed in their stewardship role during the past 25 years. It is the job of the government to protect air, land and water – “the commons”, that upon which we all depend for healthfulness and survival.

It is the job of citizens to call them to account.

A first step is to re-define our indicators of “growth” and health.

The indicator that should be used for health is the trend lines for disease and developmental problems in Saskatchewan. If those lines are in a relentless upward trend, then obviously our healthcare dollars are being spent in the wrong place. “Wait times” tell us that we have an excess of patients.

The Earth is man’s only friend. When we poison her, we poison ourselves.

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The Green Party supports a sustainable society that uses resources in a way which benefits our generation and those of the future.

We must maintain an ecological balance and live within the resource limits of Saskatchewan and our planet.

Sheila Fraser, Auditor General of Canada gives guidelines (Nov 2007, CBC):

1) Clear sustainable development strategies are needed to create better economic well-being.

2) Establish meaningful action plans with deadlines, and consequences to make them effective.

3) Hold government to account for meeting good management objectives with regular audits to validate facts and press for implementation of action plans and agreements.

I invite you to join with us to move to an energy efficient economy. We will live in ways that respect the integrity of natural systems.

Sandra Finley

Leader, Green Party of Saskatchewan
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REFERENCES (INPUT FROM VARIOUS PEOPLE)

Lazslo Pinter writes:

There is a movement under way that already picked up this issue and is getting stronger and gaining political attention, though not yet enough in Canada, but hopefully we will get there.

In particular, I would note:

There isn’t a quick fix and we are a long way from getting to the bottom of this problem, but if we don’t, we continue to carry the burden of a flawed accounting system at enormous costs in almost everything we do.

By the way, the need is not only for helpful *economic* indicators.

Best, LP

===========================

My apologies. I lost track of who contributed this:

I would recommend a book: “Growth Fetish” by Clive Hamilton (an economist who saw the light). I have a couple of chapters that were free online and will attach them. Another great book of his is called “Affluenza” and is well worth reading.

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Leora Harlingten adds:

“I have a book called the economics of happiness. It has interesting stuff on economic indicators.

Also Marilyn Warrings work is good. She has a couple of films at the Saskatoon public library on economics.

There is also Michael Albert’s book = ‘Parecon’ on participatory economics. ===============================

Kathleen Cameron writes:

There is a very helpful indicator of complete cost analysis and it is called “life cycle analysis” and instead of our society basing its success on the GDP as it presently is, it should be based on the outcome of each and every “life cycle analysis”. This indicator takes into account the cost of all of those items that you indicate below and more – it takes into account “all of the costs” of a particular product throughout its entire life, i.e. therefore with the uranium industry, it would take into account the cost of a reactor from the time that uranium was in the mining process through to the end of the life expectancy of the uranium, i.e. when it was no longer a danger, e.g. how many hundreds of thousands of years? This particular life cycle analysis would therefore only change if they came up with a useful product that could be recycled from all of the products of the initial reactor. The analysis can get very detailed however it brings into light ALL of the actual costs of a product in mind.

Again, what is the cost of a pharmaceutical? Something as simple as advil or Tylenol – hundreds of thousands of these pills get utilized by the general public on a daily basis and the majority of the medication ends up in the urine stream and typically ends up in water supplies. Once in that water supply it breaks down into carcinogenic components initially and eventually becomes inert but not until after it has damaged our environment. This information would be included in life cycle analysis and the pharmaceutical company would be required to “pay the cost” or actually the final end user since that cost be transferred on. Personally, I think it would force a lot of people to use more environmentally practices, i.e. many would go back to a lot of the “older” ways of doing things.

2007-08-23 Quebec police admit they went undercover at Montebello protest

 Corporatocracy or Democracy or Administrative State or WHAT?, Lockheed Martin, War Economy (includes Cdn Census & Trials)  No Responses »
Aug 232007
 

There are follow-up postings to this.   Example:  2008-11-28 Follow-up on Montebello, Police provoke Violence at SPP protest (2007)

Calls for a Public Inquiry into Montebello are certainly warranted but have fallen on deaf ears.  When you see the video footage it’s a little hard to swallow the explanations given in the article below.   The officials responsible “will not comment”.   /Sandra

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http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/quebec-police-admit-they-went-undercover-at-montebello-protest-1.656171 

Quebec police admit they went undercover at Montebello protest

Last Updated: Thursday, August 23, 2007 | 7:52 PM ET

CBC News

youtube-montebello-070823

A YouTube video shows Dave Coles, president of the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union, ordering three masked men back from a line of riot police. ((CBC))

Quebec provincial police admitted Thursday that three of their officers disguised themselves as demonstrators during the protest

at the North American leaders summit in Montebello, Que. 

 

However, the police force denied allegations its undercover officers were there on Monday to provoke the crowd and instigate violence.

“At no time did the police of the Sûreté du Québec act as instigators or commit criminal acts,” the police force said in French in a news release. “It is not in the police force’s policies, nor in its strategies, to act in that manner.

“At all times, they responded within their mandate to keep order and security.”

Police said the three undercover officers were only at the protest to locate and identify non-peaceful protesters in order to prevent any incidents.

Police came under fire Tuesday, when a video surfaced on YouTube that appeared to show three plainclothes police officers at the protest with bandanas across their faces. One of the men was carrying a rock.

In the video, protest organizers in suits order the men to put the rock down, call them police instigators and try unsuccessfully to unmask them.

Police-issued boots identified fake protesters

Protest organizers on Wednesday played the video for the media at a news conference in Ottawa. One of the organizers, union leader Dave Coles, explained that one reason protesters knew the men’s true identities was because they were wearing the same boots as other police officers.

Coles said on Wednesday that the only thing he didn’t know was whether the men were Quebec police, RCMP or hired security officers.

“[Our union] believes that the security force at Montebello were ordered to infiltrate our peaceful assembly and provoke incidents,” said Coles, president of the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union.

Police said the three were told to monitor protesters who were not peacefully demonstrating to prevent any violent incidents, but they were called out as undercover agents when they refused to throw objects.

Concern Canada losing control of its energy

The protest at Montebello occurred outside the Fairmont Le Château Montebello hotel, near Ottawa, where Prime Minister Stephen Harper was meeting with U.S. President George W. Bush and Mexican President Felipe Calderon. The summit about border security, free trade and other issues began Monday and finished Tuesday.

Protesters said they gathered to voice their concern about Canada losing control of its energy and water resources and borders. Others decried what they called a high level of secrecy at the summit.

The Quebec provincial police will not comment any further on the affair, a spokeswoman in Montreal said.

Quebec Justice Minister Jacques Dupuis was made aware of the news, but a spokesman from his office said he will not comment on the matter either.

 

2007-08 WATCH: Montebello, Police provoke Violence at SPP protest

 Corporatocracy or Democracy or Administrative State or WHAT?, Peace or Violence  No Responses »
Aug 152007
 

RECOMMEND:   skip the original posting below;  go to this video:

2008-11-28 Follow-up on Montebello, Police provoke Violence at SPP protest (2007)

 

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THE ORIGINAL POSTING:

This is extremely important.  Click on:   http://youtube.com/watch?v=DCRsj06wT64, video footage related to the protests at Montebello.

The SPP Meeting of August 2007 was held at Montebello, Quebec.   Protesters collected outside.

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On April 21, 2008, Prime Minister Stephen Harper traveled to New Orleans to attend the fourth annual North American Leaders’ Summit to discuss progress to the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) with his American and Mexican counterparts. It has been four years since this process began, and no one beyond an elite group of corporate CEOs has been asked how they feel about the SPP—until now.

THE FOLLOWING LINKS ARE ALL INVALID:   THE WEBSITE WAS RE-DESIGNED.  YOU MIGHT STILL FIND COPIES OF MATERIAL ON-LINE.   COPY AND PASTE WHAT YOU WANT INTO A SEARCH ENGINE.

 

http://www.canadians.org/integratethis/

Not Counting Canadians: The Security and Prosperity Partnership and public opinion

From April 7–10, 2008, the Council of Canadians commissioned Environics Research Group to conduct a survey of Canadians to find out how they feel about the major SPP policy directions and initiatives, including North American regulatory convergence, energy integration with the United States, bulk water exports, and the adoption of U.S.-style security measures in Canada. We also asked whether such a wide-reaching trilateral agreement should be brought to Parliament for a debate and vote.

Download the full report, Not Counting Canadians : The Security and Prosperity Partnership and public opinion(PDF 1.78 MB), or follow the links below:

87% of Canadians agree that Canada should maintain the ability to set its own independent environmental, health and safety standards, even if this might reduce cross-border trade opportunities with the United States. And yet the Harper government is committed to an SPP policy of regulatory harmonization in the areas of consumer product safety, food and drugs, and the environment.

89% of Canadians agree that Canada should establish an energy policy that provides reliable supplies of oil, gas and electricity at stable prices and protects the environment, even if this means placing restrictions on exports and foreign ownership of Canadian supplies. And yet the Harper government is committed to a “market-based” policy of energy integration with the U.S. through the SPP’s North American Energy Working Group.

88% of Canadians agree that Canada should adopt a comprehensive national water policy that recognizes clean drinking water as a basic human right and also bans the bulk export of fresh water. And yet bulk water exports to the U.S. are on the table in SPP discussions.

48% of Canadians do not feel that Canada should harmonize its security policies with the United States, even if this affects our trading relationship. It was the only question on which Canadians were divided. And yet the 2008 Federal budget committed millions of extra dollars to SPP security initiatives anyway.

86% of Canadians agree that the Security and Prosperity Partnership agreement should be debated and submitted to a vote in Parliament. Yet four years later, the debate is nowhere to be seen.

Canadian preferences for policies that run counter to the key SPP priorities listed above show conclusively that Prime Minister Harper does not have a democratic mandate for pursuing this agenda in secretive trilateral talks like the upcoming North American leaders summit in New Orleans. The government must cease all further SPP talks and debate the agreement fully and openly before submitting it to Parliament for a vote.

The Council of Canadians’ five demands for the SPP »

You can help stop the SPP! A citizen’s guide to fighting the Security and Prosperity Partnership »

View the full Environics poll results, Surveying Canadian attitudes towards trade issues and the SPP

For more information about the Council of Canadians, or its campaign against the SPP, please sign up to receive updates above or call us at 1-800-387-7177.

2007-08-10 Canadian Military Keeping Tabs on Peace Activists

 Peace or Violence  No Responses »
Aug 102007
 

I will contact this Steven Staples who gave an address on “The Americanisation of the Canadian Military“.  He may be interested in the Court Cases against people who refused to comply with the Census because of the involvement of Lockheed-Martin, which is pretty well synonymous with the American Military.

It fits in well with Mike Webster on the RCMP and the YouTube video on police tactics at the SPP meetings.  

(INSERT:   Lft. Col. Jamie Robertson with the Department of National Defence in this article, in defence of the tactics used by the military, says “We have a robust media environment.”.   Look ahead to the manner in which the Canada First Defence Strategy  came into being in June 2008.   The military does not use that “robust” environment.)

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Published on Friday, August 10, 2007 by Inter Press Service 

Canadian Military Keeping Tabs on Peace Activists? 

by Am Johal 

VANCOUVER – Steven Staples, a prominent Canadian peace activist, is accusing the Canadian military of subtle surveillance after the military sent an officer to take notes on him at a conference at Dalhousie University in 2006.  The story came to light a few weeks ago after freedom of information requests finally revealed that briefings had been written for senior military officers.

Staples had been invited to give a presentation at Dalhousie University as a guest of the Halifax Peace Coalition and the Dalhousie Centre for Foreign Policy Studies on the topic of “The Americanisation of the Canadian Military.”

Ironically, the U.S. Pentagon has for years closely monitored peaceful anti-war and counter-military recruitment groups, collecting more than 2,800 reports involving U.S. citizens in an “anti-terrorist threat database“, according to documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union. 

“It was clear that somebody had been tasked by the Canadian military to sit in on the session,” Staples said in an interview with IPS. “My problem is that the military initially denied it. Governments send staff to attend meetings all the time to prepare briefings – there is nothing wrong with that. It’s when they deny it and hide it that it becomes something more nefarious.”  

After repeated information requests, it was revealed that the report was sent to 50 senior military officials, including two brigadier generals. 

“It is interesting to understand the motivation of the surveillance, as the officer who wrote the report advised senior leadership to meet the arguments of people like me. When the military bureaucracy is trying to actively influence public opinion, to shift public policy, it is highly inappropriate on the part of a military in a real democracy, said Staples.

“It is inappropriate for the military to become a rogue entity and utilise their resources to monitor those who publicly hold contrary views. The Canadian military has even spied on groups such as the Raging Grannies and the United Church,” said Staples.

“It is my concern for the public to know that the military is behaving irresponsibly, because it places a chill on others. They have to think twice before speaking publicly in a critical way,” said Staples. 

He added that General Rick Hillier is an inappropriate choice for head of the military and that Defence Minister O’Connor has also been inappropriate for his position in representing the public interest. 

Staples says he will send a request for accountability of behaviour in the Canadian military which is consistent with government policy. Staples added that he has not pursued whether the Canadian Security Intelligence Service or other security agencies currently have anti-war activists under surveillance. 

Dr. Michael Byers, research chair in Global Politics and International Law at the University of British Columbia, told IPS, “Steve Staples has been attracting this attention because he’s extraordinarily effective in critiquing Canadian policy concerning defence and security. It is not surprising that they pay attention – they should learn to listen to him now and then.” 

Byers added that the military sending a representative could be seen as educational – if it was intended that way.

“But if it was surveillance, it could be the beginning of a slippery slope with the military playing an active role in shaping public opinion.  Democracy has worked hard to separate military and political roles. The Canadian public should be more concerned about other manifestations of this disturbing trend. The military has been very sophisticated with their media strategy, and there have been far-reaching public relations [campaigns] by General Hillier for the mission in Afghanistan,” said Byers.

Byers added that the trend was disturbing because of where this type of policy could lead if it is not scrutinised. “If he is under surveillance, are his phone conversations being tapped or his e-mails being monitored because he is in an advocacy role?” asked Byers. 

“I assume, even I’m being monitored, I’ve made my choice for the sake of freedom of expression. Perhaps whoever is on the other end listening might actually learn something. I don’t have anything to hide,” said Byers. 

But military officials see things differently. Lft. Col. Jamie Robertson with the Department of National Defence told IPS, “Steven Staples’ talk was on the Americanisation of the Canadian military. We have public affairs officers and representatives from National Defence, which normally attend conferences and compile information. We will summarise what is happening at conferences, but we don’t engage in monitoring. That is not the job of the Department. As public affairs officers, we need to be aware of factual information and trends in the policy debate. In this instance, the debate has been politicised.” 

He added that it is part of their mission to clarify factual information when it is misrepresented. “It is not the job of the military to conduct surveillance. We live in a democracy. It is not within the area of security.  There is nothing wrong about debate and differing opinions. We have a robust media environment. We want to engage as openly as possible. Everyone is allowed to speak to the media on the Afghanistan mission. In this case, journalists are raising conspiracy theories that are completely of context,” said Robertson. 

“Our job is not to shape public opinion, but to provide factual information to Canadians. It is part of our mission. They have a right to know what we are doing. These allegations are absurd. We are incumbent on fixing the record by being aware of the public environment. Canada’s mission needs to be seen in the context of a coalition of 21 Nations and that it is sanctioned by the U.N. The information provided is often selective. This is an important mission,” said Robertson. 

C 2007 Inter Press Service

2007-08-09 Monsanto: two more strikes against

 Corporatocracy or Democracy or Administrative State or WHAT?, Genetically Modified  No Responses »
Aug 092007
 

I wish I could tell you ALL the amazing victories flowing in.  The work in the trenches over the years pays off.

The big food chain in the U.S., Kroger, will end its sales of milk from cows injected with recombinant bovine growth hormone.  And the U.S. Patent Office has ruled against four of Monsanto’s patents on GMO crops. … Citizen action in one location feeds action in another.

I am concerned that if the large American grocery stores block the sales of milk from cows injected with rBGH, Canada will be used more and more as a dumping ground for it.  Hence my letter to the Canadian Food Inspection Agency below.

Cheers! /Sandra

========================

SENT:  August 9, 2007

SUBJECT:  Recent updates on Monsanto’s products in USA.  Questions re Canada.

 

TO:     (email addresses removed.  They will be obsolete.)

–  CFIA  (Canadian Food Inspection Agency)

–  Chuck Strahl, Minister Responsible (Agriculture)

–  Carole Swan, President

–  B. Evans, Executive VP

–  Dilhari Fernando, Exec Dir, Strategic Issues

–  C. Prince, VP Operations

–  Louise Duke,  CFIA Chief of Import & Domestic Office

–  Kirstan Finstad, near head of Plant Bio Safety Office

–  Stephen Yarrow,  Director Plant Bio Safety Office

 

Dear Chuck Strahl, Carole Swan and other Civil Servants in the CFIA,

 

Regarding rBGH (recombinant bovine growth hormone), will you please confirm:

–  rBGH (or rBST) is illegal in Canada because it was denied registration.

–  there are many milk products from the USA imported into Canada.

–  “rBGH milk” comes into Canada illegally through this importation.

–  there is no enforcement to stop “rBGH milk” products from entering the Canadian food supply.

 

I will appreciate knowing, in plain and direct language, what the situation is with rBGH milk coming into Canada. It may require corrective action.

Better to table and deal with a problem rather than deny its existence.

 

In case you aren’t aware of recent developments in the USA (July-August 2007) regarding Monsanto’s rBGH and some patents on its GMO crops, they are appended:

–  USA FOOD GIANT KROGER ANNOUNCES END TO SALES OF MILK CONTAINING SYNTHETIC HORMONES

–  USA PATENT AND TRADE OFFICE REJECTS FOUR MONSANTO PATENTS RELATED TO GMO CROPS.

 

Earlier, you received the New York Times report on court rulings regarding the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s failure to follow the law, in its licensing of Monsanto’s alfalfa.  It is related and appended for your convenience.

The gene-altered crop articles appended are to help keep Government officials abreast of information being circulated in the public domain.  I hope it will be helpful to you.

 

Thank-you in advance for your answers regarding the status of rBGH milk products coming into Canada.

 

Best wishes,

Sandra Finley

(contact info)

==============================

CONTENTS

(1)  COMMENTARY

(1A)  BACKGROUND FOR NEWCOMERS

(1B)  MILK FROM COWS INJECTED WITH rBGH COMES INTO CANADA NONETHELESS.  ILLEGAL BUT NO    ENFORCEMENT

(2)  LETTER TO HEADS AT CANADIAN FOOD INSPECTION AGENCY (CFIA)

(3)  USA FOOD GIANT KROGER ANNOUNCES END TO SALES OF MILK CONTAINING SYNTHETIC HORMONES, DENVER POST

(4)  USA PATENT AND TRADE OFFICE REJECTS FOUR MONSANTO PATENTS RELATED TO GMO CROPS

(5)  JUDGE RULES U.S. DEPT OF AGRICULTURE BROKE THE LAW IN ITS APPROVAL OF MONSANTO’S GMO ALFALFA, NEW YORK TIMES

————————–

(1)  COMMENTARY 

Monsanto is greatly diversified in its operations, even into “organic” companies.  But it will be brought to heel.  Its corrupting influence on Government will be ended, along with the influence of the other corporations in the pharma/chem/biotech complex.  Perseverance bears fruit.  The growing mass of informed people is more formidable than Monsanto. (In the past couple of weeks we have added 50+ people just to my part of our network.) We are shoulder-to-shoulder with citizens in the U.S., India, Europe, Africa, South America – the information flow doesn’t stop at national borders.

News out of the U.S.:

–  Kroger food chain will no longer stock milk with rBGH (growth hormone injected into cows) as of Feb 2008

–  The Public Patent Foundation represents the Public Interest in the U.S. patent system.  (I don’t believe that we have a similar NGO in Canada?  If we don’t, it’s not because we don’t need it!)  Four of Monsanto’s patents on GMO crops have been rejected because of PubPat’s interventions.  Hallelujah!

————————

 

(1A) BACKGROUND FOR NEWCOMERS 

–  Monsanto tried bribery of Health Canada officials to get rBGH registered in Canada (early 90’s).  Senator Eugene Whelan was instrumental in getting a Senate hearing.  The growth hormone was not registered and is therefore illegal in Canada (as I understand the registration system).

–  The Europeans also ruled against rBGH.

–  Monsanto got it registered in the U.S.  American citizens have been fighting to get rid of it for years.  The health effects for the animals and now for human health are problematic.

Monsanto uses its usual mafia tactics (the threat of breaking people’s financial well-being by taking them to court) on small dairies in the U.S.

We circulated the newspaper reports on the Vermont dairy Monsanto took to court for labelling its milk or cows as being free of bovine growth hormone (words to effect).  I still shake my head.

——————————

 

(1B)  MILK FROM COWS INJECTED WITH rBGH COMES INTO CANADA NONETHELESS. ILLEGAL BUT NO    ENFORCEMENT 

–  milk from cows injected with rBGH is, nonetheless, getting into Canada.

I met and talked with Ralph Ferguson, retired Liberal MP from near Sarnia ON (talk was about community research organized by Ralph, into the incredibly high rates of cancer in their rural area (Sarnia-London)).

In a digression Ralph mentioned the shiny tanker trucks that carry milk across the border at Sarnia, from the U.S.  The milk will be from cows injected with rBGH.  There is no evidence that the Government of Canada enforces our regulations on rBGH.

As I understand from other conversations, many of the “milk solids” used in Canada, in various milk products (including milk off the shelf that has “milk solids” added)  – many of these “solids” are imported from the U.S.

You know very well that big commercial American dairies inject their animals with rBGH to artificially increase milk production for the “milk solids”.

–  The Dept of Health officials who blew the whistle on Monsanto’s attempted bribery were rewarded by losing their jobs.  The Government of Canada has regulations to satisfy us.  It doesn’t enforce the regulations, to satisfy Monsanto.  It won’t take Monsanto on.

–  Which takes us to the U.S. Patent Office’s recent denial of patent to Monsanto for some GMO crops.  We’ve circulated information on the extent to which Monsanto has people in positions of influence in the U.S. Government.

In Canada, the Government of Canada had a 50-50 partnership with Monsanto for the development of GMO wheat (citizens achieved victory in fighting down this gene-altered wheat).  But the Governments of Canada and Saskatchewan, through “Government fronts” – Agwest Biotech and Biotech Canada – intervened in the Supreme Court on the side of Monsanto, when Monsanto took Percy Schmeiser to Court. Of course, the Governments won’t do their job of regulation in the public interest.  (Exception:  the Government of Ontario intervened on the side of Schmeiser.)

==========================================

 

(2)  LETTER TO HEADS AT CANADIAN FOOD INSPECTION AGENCY (CFIA) 

(The letter is at the top of this email)

Update:  Carole Swan is the president of the CFIA (no longer Francois Guimont).

If you wish to contact the CFIA through their web-site, go to:

http://www.inspection.gc.ca/english/tools/feedback/commene.shtml

==========================================

 

(3)  USA FOOD GIANT KROGER ANNOUNCES END TO SALES OF MILK CONTAINING SYNTHETIC HORMONES

Kroger Co.: http://www.kroger.com

http://www.denverpost.com/healthcare/ci_6574578

Monsanto: Time to Cry Over Spilled rBGH Milk?

Source: Kroger Company press release, August 1, 2007

Monsanto is discovering a troubling new side effect from use of Posilac, its controversial recombinant bovine growth hormone (rBGH) injected into cows to increase milk production: use of rBGH is shriveling up the market for milk from Posilac-treated cows. In response to growing consumer demand for hormone-free dairy products, retailers are increasingly rejecting milk products derived from rBGH-injected cows. The Kroger Company announced in an August 1 press release that by February 2008 the company will sell only milk that is certified free of synthetic hormones. This represents no small blow to Monsanto; Kroger operates 2,458 supermarkets and other stores in 31 states, as well as 15 dairies and three ice cream plants. Kroger’s holdings include the major grocery chains Ralphs, Fred Meyer, City Market, Food 4 Less, and King Soopers. Kroger joins Starbucks and other retailers in rejecting use of Posilac. The bottom line? A little more pain for Monsanto and little less pain for the cows.

http://www.prwatch.org/

08/08/2007

Kroger launches broader organic push

By DAN SEWELL AP Business Writer

CINCINNATI—The nation’s largest traditional grocer is expanding organic food offerings and targeting a broader range of customers for the fast-growing segment.

The new push by Kroger Co., which was launched Wednesday, features its own brand of organic foods, from pasta to peanut butter, and displays them throughout the store, outside their usual home in natural foods sections.

Starting with 65 items, Kroger expects to double its Private Selection brand organics by the end of the year.

Linda Severin, vice president for corporate brands, said marketing under the slogan “Organics for Everyone” will appeal to consumers who don’t focus their shopping on organic foods but are interested in trying them. The private brand line generally will be priced lower than other organics Kroger sells.

“This responds to customers who just want to make a smarter food choice and start opening their lives to organic,” Severin said. “It’s a way for people to sort of put their toe in the water.”

Kroger’s line will carry the U.S. Department of Agriculture seal for organic foods, which are free of pesticides and hormones.

Kroger, Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and other major grocery sellers have been increasing selections of organic and natural foods in response to rising demand and the growth of chains such as Whole Foods Market Inc. and Wild Oats Markets Inc.

The Organic Trade Association says that while organic foods comprised less than 3 percent of total food sales in 2006, annual percentage sales growth in the past decade has been in the high teens into the twenties, up to $16.7 billion.

“Organics is probably the hottest thing going in the food market right now,” said Ted Taft, managing director of Meridian Consulting Group. “The conventional grocery channel has seen that growth and seen that as something they need to have.”

He said Kroger and other large chains can offer lower prices than specialty stores and appeal to shoppers who are worried about organics for only certain items, such as milk.

“There are very few consumers that everything they have has to be organic,” Taft said. “If you go to a Kroger, you have options.”

Bruce Silverman, global vice president of private label for Austin, Texas-based Whole Foods, said organics have always been a Whole Foods cornerstone.

“When new competitors begin experimenting with offering organic foods, they are helping Whole Foods Market further our mission for the world to enjoy more organic and natural foods,” he said in a statement.

Ronnie Cummins, national director of the Organic Consumers Association, said that while Pleasanton-Calif.-based Safeway Inc. and some regional supermarket chains have had success with organic offerings, organic advocates are wary of giant, bottom-line companies in the market.

“They’re more concerned about their quarterly profits than their sustainability,” Cummins said. “The organic market segment is the wave of the future, and it’s not just people looking for an organic label and saying, ‘Where can I get it the cheapest?'”

Cummins noted approvingly that Kroger last week announced plans to begin selling milk that is certified as free of synthetic hormones.

The company, which operates 2,458 supermarkets and multi-department stores in 31 states, some under local names, also is offering gluten-free items such as crackers in its private brand, for those who want to avoid the wheat protein, and recently launched a milk brand that can help reduce cholesterol.

Kroger five years ago introduced a Naturally Preferred line of foods, which includes some organic foods and contain no artificial colors, preservatives or flavors, and many of its stores have a special section called Nature’s Market.

“Customers are telling us they want more of these products,” said Nancy Moon-Eilers, vice president for natural foods procurement and merchandising.

“Organic growth has been really strong, and I don’t see that easing up any time soon.”

====================================

 

(4)  USA PATENT AND TRADE OFFICE REJECTS FOUR MONSANTO PATENTS RELATED TO GMO CROPS

For those that know of the unethical shenanigans of Monsanto, this is a major coup for farmers worldwide, who can resume saving their seed without the shadow of Monsanto lawsuits hanging over them.

<Link no longer valid>

Sharon

San Francisco

 

NEW YORK – July 24, 2007 — The Public Patent Foundation (PUBPAT) announced today that the United States Patent and Trademark Office has rejected four key Monsanto patents related to genetically modified crops that PUBPAT challenged last year because the agricultural giant is using them to harass, intimidate, sue – and in some cases literally bankrupt – American farmers.

In its Office Actions rejecting each of the patents, the USPTO held that evidence submitted by PUBPAT, in addition to other prior art located by the Patent Office’s Examiners, showed that Monsanto was not entitled to any of the patents.

Monsanto has filed dozens of patent infringement lawsuits asserting the four challenged patents against American farmers, many of whom are unable to hire adequate representation to defend themselves in court.  The crime these farmers are accused of is nothing more than saving seed from one year’s crop to replant the following year, something farmers have done since the beginning of time.

One study of the matter found that, “Monsanto has used heavy-handed investigations and ruthless prosecutions that have fundamentally changed the way many American farmers farm. The result has been nothing less than an assault on the foundations of farming practices and traditions that have endured for centuries in this country and millennia around the world, including one of the oldest, the right to save and replant crop seed.”  The lawsuits filed by Monsanto against American farmers include Monsanto Company v. Mitchell Scruggs, et al, 459 F.3d 1328 (Fed. Cir. 2006), Monsanto Company v. Kem Ralph individually, et al, 382 F.3d 1374 (Fed. Cir. 2004) and Monsanto Company v. Homan McFarling, 363 F.3d 1336 (Fed. Cir. 2004).

Although Monsanto has the opportunity to respond to the Patent Office’s rejections of the patents (U.S. Patents Nos. 5,164,316, 5,196,525, 5,322,938 and 5,352,605), third party requests for re-examination, like the ones filed by PUBPAT against the four Monsanto patents, are successful in having the reviewed patents either changed or completely revoked more than two-thirds of the time.

“We are extremely pleased that the Patent Office has agreed with us that Monsanto does not deserve these patents that it has used to unfairly bully American farmers,” said Dan Ravicher, PUBPAT’s Executive Director.

“Hopefully, this is the beginning of the end of the harm being caused to the public by Monsanto’s aggressive assertion of these patents, which threatens family farms and a diverse American food supply.”

 

More information, including copies of the Office Actions issued by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office rejecting the four Monsanto patents, can be found at PUBPAT > Monsanto Anti-Farmers Patents.

= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =

(5)  See  2007-02-14 GMO’s: Judge rules U.S. Dept of Agriculture broke the law in its approval of Monsanto’s GMO alfalfa

2007-07-09 Water there, not here. Water then, not now.

 Water  No Responses »
Jul 092007
 

TO:  Golder & Assoc.  Engineering Co.   re Proposed Highgate Dam, Battlefords, North Sask River

Subject: Last one: High Gate: sent to Golder (7)

Dear Phil,

There needs to be acknowledgement and assessment of the associated increase in chemical (pesticide) load on the river from run-off,  whenever more irrigation is being promoted.

I sent the following email into my network today. It includes a newspaper report from Lloydminster last year. People are getting increasingly nervous about the chemicals we are putting into land, water, air, and food.

(sign off deleted)

=====================================

 

China is slammed for selling poisoned food to us.

2007-07-06 China’s foul waters, Washington Post Foreign Service

Some of it is fish.

Source of the problem:

“The fish are being raised in a country whose waterways are an ongoing environmental problem, tainted by sewage, pesticides, heavy metals and other pollutants.”

How is it that we say “tut, tut” or “stupid, stupid”, or “outrage” to the Chinese, but we don’t see a parallel situation here in our waterways?  It’s “there”, never “here”.

The story of the St Clair River from Sarnia-Windsor ON, and anecdotal information about fish in the North Saskatchewan River, both with petro-chemical industries on their shores, both with

“sewage, pesticides, heavy metals and other pollutants“

tell me what I remind my children: when you criticize someone else, usually it is yourself that you see in them.

Exactly where will edible fish come from?  There are serious questions to be answered.

A person from Lloydminster told me that fishermen catch deformed fish in the North Saskatchewan River. So they won’t eat the fish they catch. From the Lloydminster Meridian Booster 17 Mar 2006:

2006-03-17 Water: Put it in upstream. It’s there downstream. Lloydminster

… the City of Lloydminster released its annual drinking water quality notice to consumers, which revealed trace elements of chemicals like arsenic, Malathion, pesticide 2,4-D and Picloram herbicide. Although the amounts appear to be well below government limits, Lloydminster alderman Duff Stewart holds concerns about the long-term impacts those potentially harmful chemicals could have. 

“When we’re pulling in things like 2,4-D we should be wondering where it’s coming from. Maybe it’s Edmonton, maybe it’s Vermilion,” Stewart said.

“Maybe we have to start looking at a lot of the things we’re ingesting, whether it’s water, our meat or whatever. …”

Do we have programmes to determine whether the anecdotal information about deformed fish in the River have a factual basis? … we spend $370,000.00 to see whether we should build a large dam on the River (the High Gate Dam near North Battleford), when it’s known that large dams are a large boondoggle.

Why shouldn’t indigenous and other people who live in North Battleford be able to feed themselves from the fish in the River? Why should they, like the people in the Arctic, have to eat imported (certainly substandard) food because the local fish are too contaminated to be health-giving?

The situation with the rivers is not good “now”. What will it be like “then”, when our grandchildren need the water? If the imported food is unreliable because the waterways in other countries are polluted or fished out, where will edible fish come from? … “then”.

————-

We have to “get” the connections, to see. If I can put the information from our network together effectively, we can arm more people with the realization that their help is necessary. It is critical that they pass information along, and some of us have to take action.

The expansion of the Tar Sands will exceed the capacity of the Athabasca River to supply the needed water. More refineries will be built on the North Saskatchewan River.

Transfer what we know about regulation of the tar sands insofar as air quality is affected, to water quality. Decide whether we should sit back, content that the Governments are doing their job of protecting the water source.

(For newcomers re air quality.)  I questioned scientists at the Saskatchewan Research Council to understand how it can be that, in today’s world, we are allowing so much sulphur dioxide and nitrous oxide emissions from the tar sands that, downwind in northern Saskatchewan, the land is already past critical load limits from acid rain, in some places. The scientist who has monitored the lakes since the early 1980’s when they were perfectly fine, said that today, “The lakes are dying”.

As I understand, the way we allow the destruction is that the regulations apply to individual operations. We don’t regulate based on OUTCOME (the lakes are dying). We don’t consider CUMULATIVE effects.

The officials are satisfied because there are tight regulations, with independent third party corroboration of the integrity of the monitoring equipment. So everything is alright. BUT the lakes and rivers are dying under the current regulations. This isn’t seen as a cause for immediate action to change the regulatory system. It seems to me a no-brainer. We need immediate changes in order to halt what isn’t right or smart.

Effective regulations mean that what was healthy in 1980 would still be healthy today. If not, the Government simply hasn’t done its job.

It is essential that we know the information in the new documentary from the Aamjiwnaang First Nation. Aamjiwnaang sits adjacent to the Suncor refinery (petro-chemical industry) in Sarnia on the St Clair River. We can use the documentary to inform ourselves here in the West. There are a number of other “same story”‘s about the industrial poisoning of rivers and lakes.

Ideally, we would make a collection of them. Does our situation here, today, lead to a different outcome for our river and our health? And if not, why don’t we draw the line now? Stop the destruction now.

Email #2 in this series is the Aamjiwnaang story. In case it’s not enough, or in case it’s “there” in Ontario and not “here” in the West, in case we can’t see our own belly button, a reminder of the story of Dr. John O’Connor with the high cancer rates in a community on Lake Athabasca in Alberta.

Refer to email TARSANDS: Backlash against a whistle-blower Globe & Mail, by Andrew Nikiforuk Sent May 22, 2007.

http://www.light.sasktelwebsite.net/health/May22-07.htm

Email #3 is an effort to get the people behind the High Gate dam proposal to transfer their energies from the dam, to securing a long-term supply of water that gives them health. If indeed there are deformed fish in the River, they should know and be taking corrective action now. There are reasons for escalating rates of some cancers. We have to go outside our communities to work aggressively and hard with other communities.

We are working on the tar sands/nuclear issue. These emails are about a River. It’s about mobilizing people to protect their water source, hopefully BEFORE it’s too late. The unregulated expansion of the tar sands and nuclear agenda in northern Alberta and Saskatchewan is a threat to the River.

The evidence is clear from the Aamjiwnaang that Suncor and the other corporations will not be regulated such that the rivers and lakes continue to give us health. In addition to the water issue, we know that the tar sands development means Canada is contributing an unconscionable amount to green house gas production. We must add more people and organizations to our networks. Those who depend on the River for their water, and understand the threat, are likely allies for the tar sands/nuclear issue.

 

2007-07-06 China’s foul waters, Washington Post Foreign Service

 Water  No Responses »
Jul 062007
 

RELATED TO:   2007-07-09  Water there, not here. Water then, not now.   (the link is good, even if it shows with a line through it.)

 

Farmed in China’s Foul Waters, Imported Fish Treated With Drugs Traditional Medicine, Banned Chemicals Both Used

By Ariana Eunjung Cha

Washington Post Foreign Service

Friday, July 6, 2007; A01

WUGONG LAKE, China — Perched above the banks of the catfish farm he owns is Zhu Zhiqiu’s secret weapon for breeding healthy fish: the medicine shed.

Inside are iodine bottles, vitamin packets and Chinese herbal concoctions that he claims substitute for antibiotics.

Zhu’s fish farm, in a village on the lower reaches of the Yangtze River, sends about 2.7 million catfish fillets each year to the United States through an importer in Virginia. Despite his best efforts — he has dozens of employees clearing trash from the water each day, and the fish are fed sacks of fish meal more expensive than rice — Zhu’s fish sometimes get sick. Then he brings out the drugs.

“It’s standard practice,” he said. “Everyone uses them to keep fish healthy.”

Chinese exporters like him have seized much of the U.S. market, accounting for 22 percent of all imports, because their fish are cheaper to raise.

The fish are being raised, however, in a country whose waterways are an ongoing environmental problem, tainted by sewage, pesticides, heavy metals and other pollutants. The situation is worst in the southern half of the country, where Zhu’s farm is and where industrial runoff accumulates.

Like other fish farmers throughout the world, catfish growers in China turn to a variety of potions. But the extent to which they use traditional Chinese medicine, which cannot be tested for as easily in the Western countries that import fish, is unusual. Zhu claims to use only safe and legal drugs, but it was clear that some of his competitors have not been so scrupulous.

The competitors spike the water with banned substances to keep their farmed fish alive. Batches of seafood traded at the Shanghai fish market this week, for example, carried the tell-tale greenish tinge of malachite green, a disinfectant powder that has been banned in China for five years because it is a suspected carcinogen but is still commonly used.

Illegal substances like malachite green keep showing up in Chinese seafood shipped to the United States, provoking a partial U.S. ban on such shipments last week. It was the latest development in an ongoing global awakening about the risks of Chinese-made products, from toys tainted with lead paint to pet-food ingredients containing a deadly industrial chemical.

Using illegal disinfectants and antibiotics “is a lazy way of raising fish,”

Zhu said. “But it is extremely effective.”

Many of the “Southern-style” catfish fillets on U.S. grocery shelves these days are indeed from the south — of China.

The Chinese government’s own reports express alarm that many rivers in this region are so contaminated with heavy metals from industrial byproducts and pesticides, including DDT, that they are too dangerous to touch, much less raise fish in.

In the city of Wuxi this month, for example, blue green algae, exacerbated by factories dumping waste, infested several nearby lakes that provide drinking water to the point where the government had to shut off the water supply. Outside of Qingdao, pollutants from nearby liquor and leather factories have turned streams a murky gray. And in Nanjing, the river that cuts through the city is full of urban trash such as twisted metal and clothing.

Chinese food producers’ reliance on chemicals, whether as a means to increase prices of their wares by tricking importers or as a way to inexpensively keep food fresh, has come under increasing scrutiny in recent months.

Zhu says that all the quality-control tests of his fish have shown no illegal substances and that the traditional Chinese medicines are safer because they are normally used to treat human illnesses.

Instead of using antibiotics, Zhu regularly gives his fish Gandankang, a Tibetan blend that people take for liver and gall bladder problems. He also sometimes uses a “magic grass pill” made from a root used to treat diarrhea or dysentery and help stop miscarriages in humans. The claim that giving fish traditional Chinese medicine is safe is backed up by China Catfish Institute, a research group affiliated with the Ministry of Agriculture.

But Cao Yulin, general manager of the Jiangsu Baolong Group, which exports catfish and uses some herbal medicines in his own fish farms, said that even traditional Chinese medicines can pose a threat. While in general they are safer than other chemicals because there is less residue, he said, some smaller farmers are not well trained and may not prepare the medicines — some of which need to be boiled or mixed — properly.

Tom Sherman, vice president of marketing for Icelandic USA of Newport News, Va., which imports catfish from Zhu’s farm through an exporter, said he was not aware that traditional Chinese medicine was used in raising the fish the company brings to the United States.

“I don’t think that would be approved by the company,” Sherman said.

In May, Alabama and Mississippi, which have their own catfish industries, stopped some grocery store sales of Chinese catfish because some contained low levels of antibiotics. The action came nearly two months before a ban by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Health officials in the United States and China worry that antibiotics could contribute to resistance in humans when ingested over long periods of time, making antibiotics less effective in the event of a serious illness.

From the Chinese perspective, however, that Alabama and Mississippi also have their own catfish-growing industries is not a coincidence. The Chinese government says that the United States’ partial ban was unjustified and that shipments should not be “automatically held and rejected indiscriminately.”

It also accused the United States of having its own seafood quality problems. The strong reaction has triggered worries of a tit-for-tat trade war between the countries.

“There are people in the United States who are propagandizing that Chinese catfish is not safe. The cause of this is that Chinese catfish exports are increasing, and they worry about the competition,” said Wang Liang, secretary general of the China Catfish Institute.

Chinese imports make up about 5 percent of all catfish sold in the United States, but that portion is growing quickly. In 2004, China sent fewer than

100 containers, at 20 tons each. By 2005, 200 containers were sent, and in 2006, 500 were shipped, Wang said. Meanwhile, concerns about pollution’s effect on the farmed fish have mounted.

Even the Chinese government’s own reports are damning, describing how industrial and urban sewage forces farmers to use chemicals to keep the fish alive.

“Environmental change is a major factor” driving fish farmers to use drugs, said Wu Tingting, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Fishery Sciences.

“It is related to the dirty water from the factories,” Tingting said. “So they use drugs to try to kill algae, to change the water quality.”

The Chinese catfish industry was born in the late 1980s after government researchers acquired fingerlings of U.S. catfish and began promoting it as a possible export industry. Catfish breeding centers were set up in a half-dozen provinces along the eastern shore. In Jiangxi province where Zhu lives, familiar fisheries were bought out and consolidated to focus on catfish exports back in 2005.

Zhu’s is one of eight fisheries in the area that sells to the Xiajiang Agricultural Industry Development, a processing company that fillets and freezes the fish. It is a high-risk but lucrative industry for the region, with a profit margin that can be as much as 40 percent for farmers and 30 percent for processors.

Liu Tianyuan, factory manager for the processing company, said profit would be even greater, even 20 percent more, if the plants were not so concerned about quality. He said the company spends a lot of money each year training its farmers on how to best use drugs safely and tests each batch of fish for illegal contaminants three times during its seven- to eight-month growing cycle.

Xiajiang sells the fish to Icelandic USA, which breads the fillets and sells them to food-service companies or through its own retail brand as “Southern-Style Biscuit Battered Catfish Fillets” at grocery stores.

In a statement, Icelandic said it supports the FDA restrictions and that it ensures quality by boarding vessels with its seafood, and checking the farms and production facilities. All of its suppliers are “required to test their products for all banned substances by an official certified laboratory,” it said.

Meanwhile, catfish farmers like Zhu remain anxious. He has invested his life savings, about $650,000, in the fishery and is not sure what he would do if his catfish were blocked by the United States. All he can do, he said, is wait and hope the United States will “be fair.”

Zhu should know soon. The ships carrying the next batch of catfish from Wugong are scheduled to arrive in Norfolk on July 18.

Staff researcher Crissie Ding contributed to this report.

2007-06-25 From living hell to living well, Globe & Mail.

 Culture and Ethics, Economy / Political Economy, Sustainability  No Responses »
Jun 252007
 
Great article! Thanks from all to Verda:
From Globe and Mail
June 25, 2007
Bogota’s urban happiness movement From living hell to living well: A radical campaign to return streets from cars to people in Colombia’s largest city is now a model for the world CHARLES MONTGOMERY
On a clear, cloudless afternoon, Enrique Peñalosa, former mayor of Bogota, leaves his office early in order to pick up his 10-year-old son from school As usual, he wears his black leather shoes and pinstriped trousers. As usual, he is joined by his two pistol-packing bodyguards. And, as usual, he travels not in the armoured SUV typical of most public figures in Colombia, but on a knobby-tired mountain bike.
Mr. Peñalosa pedals through the streets of Santa Barbara in Bogota’s well-to-do north side. He jumps curbs and potholes, riding one-handed, weaving across the pavement, barking into his cellphone with barely a thought for the city’s notoriously aggressive drivers.
On most days, this would be a radical and perhaps suicidal act. But today is special.
Ever since citizens voted to make it an annual affair in 2000, private cars have been banned entirely from this city of nearly eight million every Feb. 1. On Dia Sin Carro, Car Free Day, the roar of traffic subsides and the toxic haze thins. Buses are jam-packed and taxis hard to come by, but hundreds of thousands of people have followed Mr. Peñalosa’s example and hit the streets under their own steam.
Former Bogota mayor Enrique Penalosa tours his city by bicycle on the Car Free Day he instituted, campaigning for another term. (Juan Velasco for The Globe and Mail)
“This is a learning experiment! We are realizing that we can live without cars!” Mr. Peñalosa bellows as he cruises across the southbound lanes of Avenida 19, pausing on the wide, park-like median. A flock of young women rolls up the median’s bike path, shouting, “Mayor! Mayor!” though it has been six years since Mr. Peñalosa left office (consecutive terms are constitutionally banned in Bogota) and he has only just begun his campaign to regain the mayor’s seat.

Car Free Day is just one of the ways that Mr. Peñalosa helped to transform a city once infamous for narco-terrorism, pollution and chaos into a globally lauded model of livability and urban renewal. His ideas are being adopted in cities across the developing world. They are also being championed by planners and politicians in North America, where Mr. Peñalosa has reinvigorated the debate about public space once championed by Jane Jacobs.

His policies may resemble environmentalism, but they are no such thing. Rather, they were driven by his conversion to hedonics, an economic philosophy whose proponents focus on fostering not economic growth but human happiness.

Proponents of hedonics, or happiness economics, have been gaining influence. London School of Economics professor Richard Layard, who wrote the seminal Happiness: Lessons from a New Science, was an adviser to Tony Blair’s first Labour government. Prof. Layard asserts that, contrary to the guiding principle of a century of economists, income is a poor measure of happiness.
Economic growth in England and the U.S. in the past half-century hasn’t measurably increased life satisfaction.

So what makes societies happy? The past decade has seen an explosion in research aiming to answer that question, and there’s good news for people in places like Bogota: Feelings of well-being are determined as much by status and social connectedness as by income. Richer people are happier than poor people, but societies with wider income gaps are less happy on the whole. People who interact more with friends, family and neighbours are happier than those who don’t.

And what makes people most unhappy? Not work, but commuting to work.

These are the concepts that guided Mr. Peñalosa’s car-bashing campaign.

“There are a few things we can agree on about happiness,” he says. “You need to fulfill your potential as a human being. You need to walk. You need to be with other people. Most of all, you need to not feel inferior. When you talk about these things, designing a city can be a very powerful means to generate happiness.”

In the mid-1990s, Bogota was, citizens recall, un enfierno – a living hell. There were 3,363 murders in 1995 and nearly 1,400 traffic deaths. The city suffered from the cumulative effects of decades of civil war, but also from explosive population growth and a dearth of planning. Wealthy residents fenced off their local public parks. Drivers appropriated sidewalk space to park cars. The air rivalled Mexico City’s for pollution. Workers from the squalid shanties on the city’s south end spent as much as four hours every day commuting to and from Bogota’s wealthy north.

In 1997, a study by the Japanese International Co-operation Agency prescribed a vast network of elevated freeways to ease Bogota’s congestion. Like cities across the Third World, Bogota was looking to North American suburbs as a development model, even though only 20 per cent of people owned cars.

The tide changed with Mr. Peñalosa’s election in 1998.

“A city can be friendly to people or it can be friendly to cars, but it can’t be both,” the new mayor announced. He shelved the highway plans and poured the billions saved into parks, schools, libraries, bike routes and the world’s longest “pedestrian freeway.”

He increased gas taxes and prohibited car owners from driving during rush hour more than three times per week. He also handed over prime space on the city’s main arteries to the Transmilenio, a bus rapid-transit system based on that of Curitiba, Brazil.

Bogotans almost impeached their new mayor. Business owners were outraged. Yet by the end of his three-year term, Mr. Peñalosa was immensely popular and his reforms were being lauded for making Bogota remarkably fairer, more tolerable and more efficient.

Moreover, by shifting the budget away from private cars, Mr. Peñalosa was able to boost school enrolment by 30 per cent, build 1,200 parks, revitalize the core of the city and provide running water to hundreds of thousands of poor.

The shift was all the more radical in that it was not motivated by the populist socialism that has swept much of Latin America. Mr. Peñalosa, the son of a Colombian politician and businessman, studied economics at North Carolina’s Duke University. His first book shouted Capitalism: The Best Option. Yet even as he worked as a business management consultant, and later an economic adviser to the Colombian government, he began having doubts.

“I realized that we in the Third World are not going to catch up to the developed countries for two or three hundred years,” he recalls. “If we defined our success just in terms of income per capita, we would have to accept ourselves as second- or third-rate societies – as a bunch of losers – which is not exactly enticing for our young people. So we are forced to find another measure of success. I think the only real obvious measure of success is happiness.”

HAPPIER TOGETHER

Mr. Peñalosa offers an eager ” Como le va?” – how’s it going – to a pair of dust-caked labourers cruising past on the bike path. He is clearly campaigning: Every commute is a chance to remind Bogotans that their bike routes were his idea, and their parks his doing. But he is also a preacher spreading the word.

“See those guys? Before, cyclists were seen as just a nuisance. They were the poorest of the poor,” he says. “Now, they have respect. So bikeways are important . [because] they show that a citizen on a $30 bike is equally important to someone driving in a $30,000 car.”

This principle of equity led him to hand road space over to public transit and pedestrian areas – a way of making private space public again.

University of British Columbia professor emeritus John Helliwell, who studies economics and human well-being, sees added value in such measures. “When you get data on people’s life satisfaction, and you try and explain the differences, the variables that jump right out at you relate to the trustworthiness of the environment that people are living in. How much can they trust strangers? How well can they trust people in the neighbourhood? How trustworthy are the police? The more positive answers people give on
these questions, the happier they are,” Prof. Helliwell says.

“So what do you need to do to establish these higher levels of trust? It turns out that frequency of positive interaction is the key.”

Public spaces that bring people together in congenial activity produce happier citizens than those – like traffic jams – that spur animosity and aggression, Prof. Helliwell says.

By linking the economics of happiness to urban design, Mr. Peñalosa really does seem to have made Bogotans happier. The murder rate fell by an astounding 40 per cent during his term and has continued to fall ever since. So have the number of traffic deaths. Traffic moves three times faster now during rush hour. And the changes seem to have transformed how people feel.

“The perception of the city has changed,” says Ricardo Montezuma, an urbanist at the National University of Colombia. “Twelve years ago, 80 per cent of us were completely pessimistic about our future. Now, it’s the opposite. Most of us are optimistic,” he says, referring to Gallup polls.

“Why is this important? Because in a big way a city is really just the sum of what people think about it. The city is a subjective thing.”

Bogotans don’t give Mr. Peñalosa all the credit. Every Sunday since the 1970s, Bogota has blocked off its major roads so that citizens can jog, walk or bike in safety. These ciclovia days transform the avenidas into vast, linear parks, where more than two million Bogotans come to play, picnic, do aerobics and eat sweet arepa bread from mobile vendors. A generation has grown up knowing streets can change.

But people have changed too. Mr. Peñalosa’s unorthodox predecessor, Antanus Mockus, is credited with building a new culture of citizenship. The former philosophy professor hired mimes to make fun of bad drivers. He sent actors dressed as monks into the streets to encourage people to think about noise pollution. He gave out thousands of coloured cards – the kind referees use in soccer games – so people could express their disproval of others’ driving.

Mr. Mockus convinced Bogotans it was their duty to take care of each other. Inspired by his anti-corruption campaign and message of citizenship, 63,000 families volunteered to pay 10 per cent more than their assessed property tax. By the end of his term, tax revenues had tripled.

He had prepared Bogotans for Mr. Peñalosa’s infrastructure changes, which required people to make sacrifices for the general good.

The best place to see these ideas translated into urban design is Bogota’s hardscrabble south side, where about 80,000 migrants – mostly refugees from Colombia’s civil war – arrive seeking shelter every year. Few of the streets are paved here, but a pedestrian-only avenue intersects the red brick slums of Ciudad de Cali.

This is where 19-year-old Fabien Gonzales joins the commuting throng just after sunrise en route to his job as a cashier at the Home Center on Bogota’s north end. Mr. Gonzales takes home about $238 a month and, like most of his neighbours, uses feet, bike and bus to get to work.

He cruises down one of Mr. Peñalosa’s ciclorutas on a silver mountain bike, to the Portal de las Americas, a transportation hub linking bike paths and pedestrian roads with the Transmilenio rapid-bus network. The station is surrounded by broad plazas and lawns, where people linger over hot chocolate as the sun creeps up over the Andes.

He locks his bike and pushes onto a northbound express. “Before the Transmilenio,” he says, “I had to leave home two hours before starting work. Now, it takes me 45 minutes.”

The Transmilenio is a distillation of Mr. Peñalosa’s philosophy on well-being. It also happens to turn everything most North Americans think about transit on its head. It functions much like an urban metro, combining stylish stations, fast boarding and express routes. It moves more people than many urban rail-transit systems for a small fraction of the construction cost.

“Many cities talk about building transit. We didn’t want a transit project, but a mobility project. We wanted to move people,” says Angelica Castro Rodriguez, general manager of the public-private alliance that runs the service.

The Transmilenio also reduces Bogota’s carbon dioxide emissions by nearly 250,000 tons a year. It’s the first transport system to be accredited under Kyoto’s Clean Development Plan.

But for Mr. Peñalosa, the key is that it seizes road space from other vehicles. “We are constructing democracy with our bus system. Remember, 80 per cent of Bogotans don’t own cars. For them, every day is car-free day. This busway, unlike a subway, shows that public transport has priority over private interests.”

Every week, Bogota hosts delegations from cities around the world looking for solutions to their growing pains.

“Before Peñalosa, mayors were terrified to take on the issue of auto-dominated public space, for fear that motorists would rebel
politically,” says Walter Hook of New York’s Institute for Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP).

“But he not only challenged auto dependency, he succeeded politically. He’s given other politicians the courage to follow. And other mayors have realized that they can’t build their way out of congestion.”

The ITDP now funds Mr. Peñalosa’s efforts to bring his post-car message around the world. Jakarta, Beijing and Mexico City have handed over road space to bus rapid-transit systems and more are being built in Delhi, Seoul and Johannesburg.

PEDESTRIAN BROADWAY?

Mr. Peñalosa’s solutions may work in the developing world, but is North America ready for his happy revolution?

Consider the advice he gave to planners in Los Angeles last year: Let traffic and congestion become so unbearable that drivers voluntarily abandon their car habits. And when Manhattan held a conference in October asking for a prescription for the gridlocked streets of New York, Mr. Peñalosa cheerily suggested banning cars entirely from Broadway.

“He got a standing ovation,” observed an astounded Deputy Borough President Rose Pierre-Louis. New York is now considering charging drivers to enter Manhattan.

Mr. Peñalosa was also given a hero’s welcome by hundreds of cheering urbanists, planners and politicians at last summer’s World Urban Forum in Vancouver. Stuart Ramsey, a B.C. transportation engineer, suggested it was because the Colombian had gone ahead and done what they had all been talking about for years.

“Bogota has demonstrated that it is possible to make dramatic change to how we move around in our cities in a very short time frame,” Mr. Ramsey said afterward. “It’s simply a matter of choosing to do so.

“We could improve our air quality and dramatically reduce our emissions any time we want. It’s easy to do. All it would take is a can of paint and you’d have dedicated bus lanes. It doesn’t require huge amounts of money. It simply requires a choice.”

The fact that the people who plan and build the world’s urban areas should applaud an attack on private cars suggests that cities may be on the verge of a massive change. Yet Mr. Peñalosa points out that North American cities may face a much bigger challenge than poor cities like Bogota. For one thing, we have already spent billions wrapping ourselves in freeways.

“Transportation is a problem that gets worse the richer societies become,” he says. “The 20th century was a disaster for cities. And the most dynamic economies produced the worst cities of all. I’m talking about the U.S. of course – Atlanta, Phoenix, Miami, cities totally dominated by private cars.”

In Canada, commuters are discovering that the highways that brought us suburbia are no longer getting us to work so quickly. From 1992 to 2005, the average commute time in Canadian cities rose to 63 minutes from 54.

This is bad news for happiness. Recent studies on life satisfaction show that commuting makes people more unhappy than anything else in life. (It is, apparently, the opposite of sex.) Commuting also happens to rob us of time for family and friends.

In a 2004 study of German commuters, psychologists found that the longer people spent getting to work, the lower their general life satisfaction tended to be. The malaise brought on by commuting was not being balanced by work satisfaction or higher income.

If commuting makes us so unhappy, why do North Americans keep buying houses in distant suburbs? Harvard University psychologist Daniel Gilbert suggests that it is because humans are just not very good at predicting what will make us happy.

“When we make predictions about happiness, we typically fail to consider adaptation – the process by which the brain gets used to things,” explains Prof. Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness. “It is much easier to adapt to things that stay constant than to things that change.

“So we adapt quickly to the joy of a larger house in the suburbs because the house is exactly the same size every time we come in the front door. But we find it difficult to adapt to commuting by car because every day is a slightly new form of misery, with different people honking at us, different intersections jammed with accidents, different problems with weather, and so on.”

So the misery of the long commute will almost always trump the happiness of that spacious den, Prof. Gilbert says.

The only major Canadian city where commute times didn’t shoot up in the past decade was freeway-free Vancouver, where the city stopped adding road capacity in 1997 and has been aggressively “traffic-calming” ever since.

Thanks to the city’s decision to develop dense new neighbourhoods near the downtown core, almost two-thirds of journeys made around downtown are done on foot, by bike or on transit. Aside from cutting carbon emissions, this kind of commuting also boosts feelings of connectedness and public trust, according to UBC’s Prof. Helliwell.

In terms of happiness, then, Canada’s big-city mayors are on track when they press the federal government for a national transit strategy. But Bogota suggests the secret may lie not in the megaprojects favoured by ribbon-cutting politicians, but in cheaper options that move more people.

The Toronto Transit Commission wasn’t crazy about Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s announcement of an 8.7-kilometre extension of the Spadina subway line, for example, because the same $2-billion could have bought 47 km of light-rail line instead.

Still, Bogotans are not necessarily better than Canadians at predicting what will make them happy. In 1996, when traffic congestion was considered the city’s biggest problem, they voted against auto restrictions. It took courage – and, some say, arrogance – for Mr. Peñalosa to ignore the polls.

By 2001, the measures and the mayor were wildly popular. Citizens voted to ban cars entirely during rush hour by 2015. And if, as polls suggest, they re-elect Mr. Peñalosa this October, the war on cars will escalate.

“We’re lucky in the developing world,” Mr. Peñalosa says as we roll up to his son’s school. “We haven’t had the money to build all those freeways. We are growing quickly, but we still have a chance to build our cities properly, to avoid the mistakes made in North America.”

Children pour out of the school’s iron gates, Mr. Peñalosa’s own son, Martin, among them. The boy carries a helmet and wheels a miniature version of his father’s bike. The two wobble their way along Avenida 19’s cicloruta, veering into the grass on either side of the path.

The median feels like a park, filled with children, suited businessmen, fast-food cashiers, the wealthy and the poor, strolling or rolling home together. On the whole, they do seem quite happy.

The scene reflects the city, a place that is more than the sum of its concrete, more than a set of efficiencies to maximize and so much more than a machine for creating wealth. It is, Mr. Peñalosa says, a means to a way of life.

Charles Montgomery is the author of the Charles Taylor Award-winning book The Last Heathen.

2007-06-10 Blessed Unrest & A Force More Powerful (non-violent resistance)

 Corporatocracy or Democracy or Administrative State or WHAT?, Empowerment, Why we flounder or do not flounder  No Responses »
Jun 102007
 

 This book Blessed Unrest by Paul Hawken will give you a high that lasts.  Cheaper than anti-depressants and with no side effects.  Call it up from memory anytime you feel yourself being sucked low in pessimism about the future of human society on Earth.  

The Earth has an immune system:  it’s us!  In the millions and from all around the world we are mobilizing. 

CONTENTS:

(1)  FRANKE JAMES IS PART OF “THE MOVEMENT” DESCRIBED IN BLESSED UNREST, ­ How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being & Why No One Saw it Coming

(2)  I WANT TO REGISTER US ON WISER EARTH, THE RELATED WEB-SITE

(3)  NOTE FROM PAUL HAWKEN, AUTHOR OF BLESSED UNREST (& the book NATURAL CAPITAL)

      (3a)  QUOTATION FROM BLESSED UNREST

(4)  REQUEST FOR INFORMATION (to you):  DO YOU KNOW OF, OR CAN YOU FIND A WEB-SITE THAT … ?

(5)  BOILING FROG, ANOTHER CELL IN THE MOVEMENT

      (5a)  BACK TO OUR SENSES:  HOW DO WE FREE OURSELVES FROM THE TRAP OF FEAR?

      (5b)  BICYCLE RIDE TO THE ALBERTA TAR SANDS

(6)  A FORCE MORE POWERFUL

(7)  ALL OUR COWARDICE & SERVILITY

(8)  OILSANDS TRAINING CAMP NON-VIOLENT RESISTANCE, EDMONTON JOURNAL, June 4th

———————– 

(1)  FRANKE JAMES IS PART OF “THE MOVEMENT” DESCRIBED IN BLESSED UNREST, ­ How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being & Why No One Saw it Coming  

Our network is part of the movement.

Elaine Hughes with her information service and web-site, “Stop the Hogs” is part of the movement. 

Franke James (Ontario) is an amazing part of it.   http://www.frankejames.com/debate/?p=34   Wow!

—————- 

Hi Franke, 

Blessed Unrest  is the best book I’ve read this year.  Mainly because it provides so much hope along with a realistic statement of the knife’s edge that we’re on.  I needed an injection of that hope.  (Some people know of Paul Hawken from his book “Natural Capital“.)  

After viewing your work, To My Future Grandkids in 2020  http://www.frankejames.com/debate/?p=34 I’ve posted a note to your web-site: 

There’s a book published this year by Paul Hawken, “Blessed Unrest“.   Your work is part of the “unrest”, and a wonderful contribution to the movement that has no name.  Individuals and organizations from around the world are the immune system of the planet, kicked into action by the threat to the survival of the organism (the planet). 

The web-site http://www.wiserearth.org  (Wiser Earth) is being used to create an idea of the magnitude of this immune system.  Thousands of organizations,  tens of thousands of individuals.   There is great hope in the face of seemingly insurmountable environmental odds. 

You are an inspiration to others to become involved, each of us to become another activated cell in the earth’s immune system. 

Re your statement:  I plan to do one on the Tar Sands…   That’s terrific.  I live in Saskatoon and run an activist email network.

Both the governing NDP and the opposition Sask Party (Conservatives) promote tar sands expansion and development of the nuclear industry with glib reassurances regarding the impact on human health and the environment.  In desperation I’ve been driven into politics (!) and am currently leader of the Green Party of Saskatchewan.  We hope that informed people here will at least have a place to register their vote (they will if we can line up 58 candidates). 

================ 

(2)  I WANT TO REGISTER US ON WISER EARTH, THE RELATED WEB-SITE 

Sent:  June 6, 2007

 Dear Paul (Hawken), 

I doubt you can know the gift that Blessed Unrest is to me.  You articulate what I “kind of know” but at a pre-verbal level.  The book is extremely well written.  When I can see me confirmed as an organism that is part of this larger body my sometimes faltering hope surges again.  It makes me happy, even joyful.  (I’ve told people that I’ve become an evangelist for Paul Hawken & Blessed Unrest!) 

I was going to register on Wiser Earth.  As an individual isn’t quite right because of the others who are involved with me.  As an organization doesn’t quite fit either because we aren’t really an organization!   How many are we?…  Who knows?  For seven years I’ve encouraged people to set up their own network, to pass information along.  Some participants have gone off and set up a network similar to mine and better (especially when it comes to a web-site!). 

Well it’s serious yet fun, and you meet the best people.  Easy to become fearful when you’re working against the interests of the Monsantos of the world, the pharmaceutical companies and now the petro-chemical and nuclear industries.  But connected we are strong. 

We have the world’s richest deposits of uranium here in Saskatchewan.  And tar sands.  Corporate interests working with our governments are destroying our health and environment.  If they have their way, northern Saskatchewan, a beautiful land of lakes and trees will be a raped wasteland.  Indigenous occupants who rely on the fruits of the land will be driven off to the dysfunctional portion of the native communities in the cities.  Already and just since 1980, soil and water acidity levels in some places are past “critical load limits”.  Expansions are nonetheless to be four and five times on the Alberta side of the border alone.  Nuclear reactors, deep geological depositories to welcome  to Saskatchewan high-level radioactive waste from across the country and probably parts of the U.S…. 

Thank goodness there are many organizations with which we are in the process of building coalitions to stop the madness, the poisoning of our land and water supplies. 

Thanks again for your contribution.  Blessed Unrest is fuel for our persistence.  I will be sending information on your book into the networks, my own and those I feed into.   There are large water, GMO, Food, etc networks in Canada.  I’ll point those I’m familiar with to Wiser Earth.  I believe that you’re right:  there are millions of organizations and people all busily working to bring about a new vision of what life is about. 

Cheers!

 Sandra Finley 

=============== 

(3)  NOTE FROM PAUL HAWKEN, AUTHOR OF BLESSED UNREST 

Dear Sandra 

Thank you so much . Your comments are much appreciated. I just got back from BC last night and hope I can return to Canada again to talk about the book and Wiser. 

I have forwarded this to Peggy Duvette, director of Wiser, who I think can shed some light on your queries and ideas.  

Again, thanks so much 

Paul 

      (3a)        QUOTATION FROM BLESSED UNREST, THANKS TO JANET: 

³Evolution is not about design or will; it is the outcome of constant endeavors made by organisms that want to survive and better themselves. The collective result is intoxicatingly beautiful, rife with oddities, and surpassingly brilliant, yet no agent is in control. Evolution arises from the bottom up ­ so, too, does hope. When fire destroys a forest, the species and plants that were lost will reassert themselves over time. Seeds that have lain dormant for decades and that germinate only when subjected to intense heat will come to life, and bloom in the spring. These plants may have deep taproots that bring up minerals, or broad leaves that create a canopy to help preserve topsoil from sun and rain. The older the forest, the more resilient its capacity to regenerate. Humanity is older than the oldest forest. Its capacity to adapt and restore is vastly underestimated.

Evolution is optimism in action. Being compelled to make more of ourselves is the human lot  Š²  ­   Paul Hawken in Blessed Unrest, ­ How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being & Why No One Saw it Coming.

 ==================================== 

(4)  REQUEST FOR INFORMATION:  DO YOU KNOW OF, OR CAN YOU FIND A WEB-SITE THAT … ? 

I suspect there may be a web-site that is devoted to information and a listing of organizations who are working on the tar sands / nuklear power plants. (The latest word is that the nuklear plants will go into northern Alberta, not Saskatchewan.  Decision would be result of polling.  Where is there the least resistance?). 

I have no idea how all this will fall into place, but let me throw out the pieces: 

I came back from Ottawa Conference (Prevent Cancer Now – activists) with more excellent contacts and information.   The health ramifications from petro-chem industry in southern Ontario (Sarnia down to Windsor) are frightening.  Childhood leukemia,  male birth rates down from where they should be at 51% of new births, to 35%.  Tar sands is petro-chemical industry.   New documentary on Sarnia-Windsor aired at Conference and will be very useful information here.  Also, some of the people in the documentary are willing to come here to tell their story.  

I telephoned Wiser Earth.  They have a web-site on which they’re building a data base of organizations from around the world, grouped by area of work. The new book “Blessed Unrest” is about it – this “movement” around the world to correct these things that are killing the planet and us..  It’s really quite exciting.  The web-site is a place to register our own organizations but also a place to find people who are working on the same issues.  

Tar sands, oil shale, uranium mining, nuclear power plants, tritium in the water, depletion of the water resources ….  Sask and Alberta, Ont, Nunavut.  There are many connections.  At the nucluar workshop at the Conference there were people who are very concerned about the proposed new reactors (10 or 15) slated for Ontario.  I proposed that they work with us – Saskatchewan will be supplying more and more fuel, if the Sask Party has its way.   It will help people in Ontario if the provincial election in Saskatchewan can be fought on nuclear and greens pull off a substanatial portion of the vote.  It might help some politicians to get the message.

Help to break the government-business partnerships in which we lose the actual role of government which is to protect “the commons”, that upon which we are dependent for survival. 

You may have heard about the people who have organized a bicycle ride for this summer (see Boiling Frog below) that starts at the border with the U.S. in Alberta and  goes through to Ft McMurray – a protest over what’s happening with the tar sands.  It’ll be great fun!  Get your bicycle out; if you can’t, send some money to Shawn – he needs $500.  You’ll get excellent return on your dollar. 

Is there a web-site that connects all these various efforts?  If not, we can start making those connections ourselves.  Maybe use “Wiser Earth” to do the connecting.  I think we can (have to) make this “The issue” of the upcoming provincial election.  The establsihed parties are all in agreement with expansion of this incredibly destructive activity in the north.  Without regard for the fact that once it’s thoroughly poisoned, it’s a little hard for people to live there, or to eat money.  With no regard for the fact that it is because of the Tar Sands rapacious exploitation that Canada can’t meet Kyoto targets. 

Anything and everything that all the various players do is helpful to us all.  Lots of people have left Saskatchewan but maintain relationships with people here.  Maybe they’ll help.  Some of them have cottages in the north.   Won’t be worth much by the time the acid rain finishes the deadening of the lakes.  (reference Canadian Council of Ministers of the Environment Report.  Parts of the north are already past “critical load limits”.) 

Support for the Green Party in the election won’t be built by a large advertising campaign.  (Hah!  we have $2000 in the bank account.)   It’ll be built through networks.  I think people will understand that a good showing in the election for the Greens in Saskatchewan will be another piece of the non-violent resistance that is aimed at creating a changed and new vision for what we want and will have. 

There are a reasonable number of people from Manitoba connected to our work here.  The ties have been strengthened in the last year because of the preliminary feasibility study for the High Gate Dam on the North Sask River near North Battleford.  We try to keep Manitobans informed because of the role of the N Sask River in the (un)health of Lake Wininipeg.   There’s a great group of people who are mobilized along the River from Alberta border to N Battleford over the dam. 

Manitobans will help:  we are beginning to see the threat to the River/Water that comes with more and more of the Tar Sands and nuclear agenda.   The industry poisons the water (newspaper report, Lloydminster, a year ago suggests that, and the new documentary out of Sarnia petrochemical industry provides back-up substantiation.  Also Dr. O’Connor’s report on the health dilemmas of native people in Ft Chipewyan on Lake Athabasca).  The industry also has a rapacious thirst.  It’s depleting.  

When the job is done and the money’s in the pocket they will walk away.  They were never from here.  … We are most peculiar people.  We know from places around the world that local environment and economies will be destroyed after which the beneficiaries walk away.  We just never think it will happen to us.  Wakey, wakey! 

I am amazed by the growing resistance to what is happening in the world.  In London, ON (November) a woman told me that she and some co-workers have organized a little club for viewing documentaries.  An Inconvenient Truth was first on their list. 

While in Ottawa (May) I was told of a group that is meeting in a rural Ontario town at their Library to view some of the same documentaries as the London office workers.

 Last week I joined a small group in Craik, SK.  (see Boiling Frog below)  We’re talking a population of what?  450 people and they have an information initiative underway. 

A big part of it is the availability of good, inexpensive documentaries.   You don’t need a movie theatre to view them. 

Sandra

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(5)  BOILING FROG, ANOTHER CELL IN THE MOVEMENT 

Thanks to Boiling Frog for this material. 

—– Original Message —–

From: “boilingfrog” <boilingfrog AT boilingfrog.ca>   

Sent: Tuesday, June 05, 2007 11:15 AM

Subject: [b.frog] Food, Peace, Solar Fair, Gold Medals and more… 

EXCERPTS: 

Hi and welcome to another edition of our email digest….

     (5a) BACK TO OUR SENSES:  HOW DO WE FREE OURSELVES FROM THE TRAP OF FEAR?

(Link no longer valid:   http://www.derrickjensen.org/fear01.html )

(INSERT:  (Sandra.  Go to the web-site.  The whole article is well worth the reading time.) 

> (excerpt)

 ‘.In the sixteenth century, Éttiene de la Boétie reminded us that  when the powerful are insatiable, submission is fatal – that the more  we submit ourselves to to the “law and order” of those in power, the more they will demand. He wrote that “the more tyrants pillage, the  more they crave, the more they ruin and destroy; the more one yields  to them, and obeys them, by that much do they become mightier and more formidable, the readier to annihilate and destroy. But if not one thing is yielded to them, if, without any violence they are simply not obeyed, they become naked and undone and as nothing, just as, when the root receives no nourishment, the branch withers and dies.” 

Sure, we are afraid. There is much to fear. But with a world being  destroyed before our eyes, this belief that we have something to  lose soon becomes an illusion. And the best guide I know to help lead me away from these illusions is my heart. Following my heart has never led me wrong. .’ 

      (5b)  BICYCLE RIDE TO THE ALBERTA TAR SANDS 

Support an upcoming Canadian environmental leader (donation appeal)  boilingfrog note: please help our friend and website  (http://www.boilingfrog.ca) designer, Shawn Khan, reach his  fundraising goal of $500.00 for his participation in a Sierra Club bicycle ride to the Alberta tar sands. We pledge $50 to get it started. you?

There is a bike trip from the US/Alberta Border to the Tar Sands in Alberta.  We are going to go for three weeks to collect stories about  people who have been affected by the tar sands and document the landscape of the environment.  The whole bike trip is going to be from August 15 – Sept 7th, and will be with many great people.

> I am 23 from Toronto and have been into the environment my whole life.  Have a compost that is fully in working condition, and have been a  cyclist for many years.  You should donate to me as I have been hailed as a future leader in the environment world by many organizations  including Forest Ethics, Sierra Club of Canada and many others.

Thanks,

Shawn 

============================ 

(6)  A FORCE MORE POWERFUL  (non-violent resistance) 

Thanks so much to Kelly and Bridget at Boiling Frog for arranging to show this film in Craik.  It is just excellent.  

The story from the Edmonton Journal below about the training for non-violent resistance around the Tar Sands coincidentally appeared at the same time. 

http://www.aforcemorepowerful.org/films/index.php     PBS 

A Force More Powerful, a three-hour documentary series, explores one of the 20th century’s most important but least-understood stories – how nonviolent power overcame oppression and authoritarian rule all over the world.  Narrated by Ben Kingsley, it premiered on PBS in September 2000.

 Bringing Down A Dictator, a one-hour documentary, is the inside story of how Milosevic was brought down – not by smoke and flames, but by a courageous and risky campaign of political defiance and massive civil disobedience.  Narrated by Martin Sheen, it premiered on PBS in March 2002. 

The feature-length documentary, Orange Revolution, captures the songs and spirit of a unique moment in Ukrainian history, when the 2004 stolen election brought citizens together on the streets for 17 days to defend their vote and the future of their country. 

Confronting the Truth, a 75-minute documentary, examines how countries which have experienced massive human rights violations have created truth commissions to air and acknowledge the abuses so that victims can regain their dignity and society can be rebuilt. 

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(7) ALL OUR COWARDICE & SERVILITY 

Old-timers will know of my interest in non-violent resistance.  I have visited the Museum of Non-Violent Resistance at the former “Checkpoint Charlie” on the now-gone Berlin Wall, twice. 

I love the anonymous poem penned by one of the victors.  ALL OUR COWARDICE AND SERVILITY.  

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(8)  OILSANDS TRAINING CAMP NON-VIOLENT RESISTANCE, EDMONTON JOURNAL, June 4th

(NOTE:  This article refers to Mike Hudema as a former Albertan.  He grew up in Alberta, is a graduate of their Law School.   At the time of this article he was 31 years old and back in Canada.  In the time since this article was written I have had the very good fortune of meeting Mike in person.   If everyone was like Mike we would share a friendly, responsible and wonderful time on Earth.  From wikipedia:  Mike Hudema was born in Medicine Hat, Alberta in 1976 from Ukrainian origin parents and attended Crescent Heights High School.[3] He graduated from the University of Alberta with a bachelor of education, majoring in drama, and a law degree, specializing in labour and environmental law.[4] During his university career, he went on an exchange to southern India, which he credits with awakening him politically. During the exchange, he recalls seeing 20,000 people “getting together to debate the village budget for the next year”, and says that the contrast between that and the models of representative democracy in use in Canada affected him and shaped his views on political involvement”.)

Oilsands growth energizes activists; Environmentalists turn up pressure on ‘unsustainable’ development with training camp in non-violent protest tactics

The Edmonton Journal Monday June 4, 2007 Hanneke Brooymans

EDMONTON – A group of frustrated environmentalists has gathered at a camp on the outskirts of Edmonton to learn eco-activist tactics for use against booming oilsands development.

The five-day clinic is scheduled to begin today at a secluded acreage southwest of the city, where 50 to 75 young people are preparing to mobilize against the oilsands by learning non-violent, direct-action tactics from internationally renowned environmentalists.

“I think the reason why we’re training people in those types of tactics is we’ve tried to work through the regulatory process,” said Mike Hudema, a former Albertan who now directs the Freedom from Oil program for a California group called Global Exchange.

“We’ve seen the majority of Albertans come out to the oilsands consultation process speaking against it. But the (Alberta Energy and Utilities Board) has a history of just rubber-stamping every single project that comes before it.

“We’re now having to resort to more aggressive tactics to try and get this project stopped, because the traditional means society is supposed to have input into this conversation and to actually slow the project are obviously not being listened to.”

Hudema said the majority of the young activists are from Alberta, but there are some from other parts of Canada, including the Northwest Territories. They’ll learn about grassroots organizing, working with community groups, and basic facts on global warming, as well as direct action such as scaling tall structures to hang banners, he said.

Hudema has a long history of activism. He once occupied former deputy prime minister Anne McLellan’s office in protest of Canada’s anti-terrorism legislation. He was also part of the Edible Ballot Society, whose members faced charges for eating their federal election ballots.

Two other trainers for the camp include Mike Roselle, a founder of the group Earth First!, known for climbing into trees and staying aloft to protect them from loggers.

Another trainer, J.R. Roof, used to be the director of the Greenpeace division that sailed around the world challenging whaling ships. The focus of the Edmonton camp is on the oilsands because it’s one of the most environmentally destructive projects in the world, said Hudema.  From a global-warming perspective, it will be the single largest reason why Canada can’t meet its Kyoto commitment, he said. The industry also uses huge amounts of water and will chop down a vast expanse of the boreal forest to lay the groundwork for more oilsands development, he added.

“The biggest fact is that most of this is going to the U.S. And so it’s destroying one-fifth of Alberta all to feed the U.S. oil addiction.” In the months following the training, Hudema predicts, more young people will become active and start asserting their vision for Alberta and what they want done for their future.

The activist camp is part of a larger trend of environmental focus on the oilsands.  The Sierra Legal Defence Fund said last November it will set up an office in Alberta this year in response to rapid oilsands and coalbed methane development. Greenpeace is also hiring a person to work exclusively on oilsands issues. And now World Wildlife Fund Canada is in the process of setting up an office in Edmonton to deal with both the Mackenzie River basin and oilsands issues.

The program director in the fledgling office is Rob Powell, a PhD-level ecologist who has lived in Alberta for 17 years.  For 15 of those years, he worked for the Natural Resources Conservation Board as director of science and technology and as an acting board member who participated in decision-making panels.  In December, he joined WWF Canada. “I just decided I really wanted to work directly in conservation.”  Powell also worked with the AEUB through a shared services relationship with Natural Resources Conservation Board.

“I have attended some of those hearings, and like a lot of people have been disturbed by the fact that everything seems to be approved,” he said.  “I’m not surprised that the tarsands have become a focus, because they are probably a good example, unfortunately at this point, of unsustainable development,” he said.

Powell said his office, which will eventually be staffed with two others, will first concentrate on oilsands water issues, specifically how much water can safely be taken from the Athabasca River before it hurts the fish and human populations that rely on the river.

The World Wildlife Fund’s approach to the oilsands problem will be to bring technical expertise to the table and try to work with people to find solutions to problems. “So you’re not going to see us leaping from towers and pulling stunts as some of the other groups might do, or orchestrating placard protests.”

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