Green Party of VenturaEARTH DAY AT OXNARD COLLEGE
by Pamela Meidell, Executive Director, The Atomic Mirror;
given on the campus of Oxnard College Monday, April 22, 2002
Morning thoughts. Clock ticking. Birds chirping. Ocean roaring. Cars passing. Light coming on. Fog horn sounding. Across the channel, a heron perches on top of a street light. In the channel, fish surface, sending ripples over the still waters. Life is here. The earth turns. A blessing. We wake up. We live. We act. Our acts have consequences. Impinge on others, others being strawberries, sea lions, sand dunes, salmon, crows, orange trees. It's April 22, and it's Earth Day.
What is the Earth telling us today, here in Ventura County? What would happen if we just went out into the middle of the Oxnard Plain, and listened to it? What would we hear? What would we hear if we went up Sycamore Canyon to the heart of the Santa Monica Mountains? What if we stood at the mouth of the Santa Clara River where it meets the sea and listened? What would we hear?
Every day is a day to honor the earth. But today we actually do it. We are standing here on Chumash land. It stretches from what we now call Malibu (a Chumash word) to beyond San Luis Obisbo--a long stretch that includes the Channel Islands. I want to take this moment to honor and thank the people who lived here before us, and still live here with us as neighbors. They lived here sustainably for thousands of years. I particularly honor and thank my friend, Pilulaw Khus, an elder of the Bear Clan of the Coastal Band of the Chumash Nation, who lives near Morro Bay. I have learned a lot from her about this place where we live.
I first met Pilulaw in Santa Barbara at a Peace Retreat. We sat next to each other in a circle, and I learned of her involvement and leadership in the occupation of Point Conception on Vandenberg Air Force Base in the late 1970s. A liquid natural gas line was planned for the area. Her advice to us then is the same as her advice would be to us now: "The remedy is so simple. Just stop. Don't add any more to the problem." Thank you, Pilulaw!
On Earth Day, many of us think of our indigenous brothers and sisters and elders, and of our debt to them. Today, many speakers will quote Chief Seattle. You've probably heard his words before. I often heard them when I lived in Seattle.
"There was a time when our people covered the whole land, as the waves of a wind-ruffled sea cover its shell-paved floor. But that time has long since passed away… Even the rocks that seem to lie dumb as they swelter in the sun along the silent seashore in solemn grandeur thrill with memories of past events connected with the fate of my people….When the last red man shall have perished from the earth and his memory among white men shall have become a myth, these shores shall swarm with the invisible dead of my tribe, and when your children's children shall think themselves alone in the field, the store, the shop, upon the highway or in the silence of the woods, they will not be alone… At night, when the streets of your cities and villages shall be silent, and you think them deserted, they will throng with the returning hosts that once filled and still love this beautiful land."
But most people, when they quote him, won't go on to say that his traditional lands--the lands of the Suquamish People in Puget Sound is currently occupied by the U.S. Trident Nuclear Submarine Base. The home of ten Trident submarines, the most deadly and lethal force on the planet. Each submarine has the murderous equivalent of 896 Hiroshima atomic bombs. (16 missiles, 8-100 kt warheads = 128, x 7 Hiroshima bombs = 896, x 10 subs = 8,960) And there are ten submarines--that's almost 9,000 Hiroshimas, on patrol in the Pacific Ocean. On the beaches next to the submarine pens, the Suquamish people still retain their traditional rights to dig the clams. What an image of death and life.
But I digress. Or do I? Earth Day is nothing if it's not about our sense of place. Where we live. Here's a glimpse of where we live:
"Viewed from the distance of the moon, the astonishing thing about the Earth, catching the breath, is that it is alive. Aloft, floating free beneath the moist, gleaming membrane of bright blue sky, is the rising Earth, the only exuberant thing in this part of the cosmos. If you could look long enough, you would see the swirling of the great drifts of half-hidden masses of land. If you had been looking for a very long, geologic time, you could have seen the continents themselves in motion, drifting apart on their crustal plates, held afloat by the fire beneath. It has the organized, self-contained look of a live creature, full of information, marvelously skilled in handling the sun." (Lewis Thomas, The Lives of a Cell)
On this day, we widen our vision to remember that we human beings share this beautiful planet with clams, sea lions, western red cedars, octopus, brown pelicans, salmon, cormorants, and each other. We also share it with cars, Trident submarines, airplanes and skyscrapers. We are a Global Village.
If this village had a population of 1000 people it would include: 584 Asians, 124 Africans, 95 Central, East and West Europeans, 84 Latin Americans, 55 former Soviets (including for the moment Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians and other national groups), 52 North Americans, 6 Australians and New Zealanders, They would not all speak the same language, if fact 165 people speak Mandarin, 86 English, 83 Hindi/Urdu, 64 Spanish, 58 Russian, 37 Arabic. This accounts for the mother tongues of only half the villagers. In this village of 1,000 there are: 329 Christians, 178 Moslems, 167 "non-religious", l32 Hindus, 60 Buddhists, 45 atheists, 3 Jews, 86 all other religions. In the village of 1,000 people, with all their different languages and beliefs there are: 5 soldiers, 7 teachers, 1 doctor, and 3 refugees driven from home by war or drought. The village has a total budget each year, public and private, of over $3 million. Of the total $3 million: $181,000 goes to weapons and warfare, $159,000 for education, $l32, 000 for health care. If the income were distributed evenly each person would receive $3,000. In fact in this 1,000-person community, 200 people receive 75 percent of the income; another 200 receive only 2 percent of the income.
Other statistics about the village include: One-third (330) of the 1,000 people in the world village are children and only 60 are over the age of 65. Half the children are immunized against preventable infectious diseases such as measles and polio. Just under half of the married women in the village have access to and use modern contraceptives. This year 28 babies will be born. Ten people will die, 3 of them for lack of food, 1 from cancer, 2 of the deaths are of babies born within the year. One person of the 1,000 is infected with the HIV virus; that person most likely has not yet developed a full-blown case of AIDS. With the 28 births and 10 deaths, the population of the village next year will be 1,018.
Only 70 people of the 1,000 own an automobile (although some of the 70 own more than one automobile).About one-third have access to clean, safe drinking water. Of the 670 adults in the village, half are illiterate. 800 live in substandard housing. 500 suffer from malnutrition. Less than one hundred has a college education. The villagers have 100 computers between them. Most of these are using the English language and owned by the members of the group that has access to over 75% of the village's wealth.
The land area of the village is under extreme pressure; The village has six acres of land per person, 6,000 acres in all, of which: 700 acres are cropland, 1,400 acres pasture, 1,900 acres woodland, 2,000 acres desert, tundra, pavement and other wasteland, The woodland is declining rapidly; the wasteland is increasing. The other land categories are roughly stable.
And added to all this is the fact the village has access to enough explosive power in nuclear weapons to blow itself to smithereens many times over. Plus a huge inventory of conventional explosives, with all manor of delivery systems, plus hundreds of small arms, plus the possibility of the use of chemical and biological agents that are available to those with the will to do so. It is any wonder that the villagers feel deeply insecure and that the minority who have access to most of the wealth and resources are seen as a threat by the majority and that the minority feels threatened by the majority and unsure of what may happen in the village in the future…history would suggest that this village was on the brink of a violent and bloody revolution.
(Statistics used in this section from Donella H Meadows on the website of EmpowermentResources.com; Last revised 9/12/00.)
We are also a local village. Here in Ventura County, we are inextricably linked with the "global village." Here are three examples:
Yes, we do have many problems. But we also have many solutions. Each one of us is a solution. Each one of you is a solution. Each one of you is part of the body of Gaia, the ancient Greek name for the goddess who is our earth. According to James Lovelock, author of The Gaia Hypothesis:
"There are as many possibilities for comfort as there are for dismay in contemplating the consequence of our membership in this [vast being]… It may be that one role we play is as the senses and nervous system for Gaia. Through our eyes she has for the first time seen her very fair face and in our minds, become aware of herself. We do indeed belong here. The earth is more than just a home, [she] is a living system and we are a part of [her]."
We often say we have only one earth. But if you are like me, you act like we have 4.3 earths. That 's how many we would need if all people lived on the earth as I do. It's called an ecological footprint. In most of the world, people use 4.5 acres of land to support their life. In the US, we use 24 acres/person. I use 19 acres, still far more than my fair share. (If you go to www.earthday.net/footprint.stm you too can find out the size of your footprint on the earth. I encourage you. The results will be taken to the Earth Summit in Johannesburg, South Africa later this year.)
So besides finding out about how big your footprint is, what else do you do? How do you understand and act out your part in the vast life of Gaia? I have a few suggestions that you might want to consider. In short, they are:
I'll finish with a brief example of my "one thing.".
Tony asked me to come here today to talk about the War on Terrorism. The War on Terrorism has to do with how safe we feel. That's a global question as well as an intimate question. We all feel more vulnerable after September 11, some of us have always felt more vulnerable than others: women, older people, children, the poor... To make us feel less vulnerable, we created nuclear weapons to protect ourselves. But as we discovered early last fall, they didn't protect us from terrorist attack. Still, we plan to build new ones in labs controlled by the University of California, and we plan to spend billions of dollars doing it. The Bush Administration announced last month that we will be targeting seven countries with our nuclear bombs: Russia, China, Syria, Libya, Iran, Iraq, North Korea. Does this make you feel safe?
Not only that, we have opened the atom, and its radioactive contents will endanger us for hundreds of thousands of years. This week, the US Senate debates what to do with nuclear waste from our nation's 104 nuclear power plants (two of them in California: Diablo Canyon and San Onofre). The state of Nevada doesn't want it in Yucca Mountain, but we don't know what else to do with it. If this plan goes through, barges loaded with nuclear waste will come down the Santa Barbara Channel from Diablo Canyon to be unloaded at Port Hueneme and shipped from there to Nevada. Does this make you feel safe?
We begin this week with Earth Day. We will end it with the 16th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear accident. In between, the US Senate will debate the fate of our nuclear waste. There's an old saying: the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. So let's be vigilant together. Pick your issue, or if you are like me, it will pick you, when you're ripe. Let's share information with each other, attend each other's events, sing each other's songs, take care of each other's children, water each other's gardens.
The Earth is often called a garden. I would like to close with the image of a garden. Imagine the end of the Cold War. Imagine all the nuclear weapons in the former Soviet Union. A decision was made to bring them all to Russia: from Kazakhstan, from Belarus, from Ukraine. On the day they left the Ukraine, June 4, 1996, a garden was planted. Former Defense Ministers Pavel Grachev of Russia, Valery Shmarov of Ukraine, and William Perry of the US planted sunflowers atop a former Soviet-era nuclear missile silo. The sunflower has become the international symbol for a nuclear-free world. It has inspired over 2,000 groups to join together in an international campaign to abolish nuclear weapons: Abolition 2000. (www.abolition2000.org)
Rolf Jacobsen, a poet of my own indigenous tradition--Viking-- has written a poem about sunflowers. I'll close with it:
What sower walked over earth,
Which hands sowed
Our inward seeds of fire?
They went out from his fists like rainbow curves
To frozen earth, young loam, hot sand,
They will sleep there
Greedily, and drink up our lives
And explode it into pieces
For the sake of a sunflower that you haven't seen
Or a thistle head or a chrysanthemum.Let the young rain of tears come.
Let the calm hands of grief come.
It's not all as evil as you think.
Happy Earth Day!!!
