Common Ground: Teacher Wins Goldman Prize

May 2004 | Dock of the Bay

Teacher Wins Goldman Prize

Margie Richard may well be a Rosa Parks of the Environmental Justice Movement. For decades Richard, a petite school teacher who wears her hair pulled back in a tight bun, lived in a trailer immediately adjacent to a Shell Oil refinery and Shell Chemical Plant on the banks of the Mississippi River, 25 miles east of New Orleans in the African-American community of Diamond, Louisiana. Local residents were convinced that chemicals from the plants made them sick. Richard alleges that her sister died at an early age from the fumes. Her children were afflicted with asthma. Other Diamond residents also contracted respiratory diseases, skin problems, and cancers that they attribute to pollution from the plants. Shell officials denied their facilities were causing the health problems.

There were also explosions. In 1973, a ruptured Shell Chemical pipeline ignited when a teenage boy in Diamond started his lawn mower. The young man, Leroy Jones, and an elderly woman, Helen Washington, were burned to death. Then, in 1988, a tremendous explosion at the catalytic cracking unit at the Shell/Motiva refinery killed seven workers and damaged almost all of the houses in town.

In 1990, while Richard was working as a physical education teacher in Diamond, a group of local women elected her to lead them in a campaign to force Royal Dutch/Shell, the third largest oil company in the world, to pay to relocate Diamond residents out of harms way.

Richard got right to work. She organized the Concerned Citizens of Norco, found allies among environmental justice groups, and told reporters what conditions were like on the fenceline in Diamond. She also traveled to Switzerland, the Netherlands, and South Africa where she testified at international gatherings about the suffering of residents who lived in her community.

In June 2002, after protracted negotiations, Shell agreed to buy out any Diamond residents who wanted to move. Diamond, the site of the largest slave revolt in the history of the United States, now looks like a ghost town.

For her efforts, Richard received a $125,000 Goldman Environmental Prize at the Herbst Theatre in San Francisco on April 19th. Founded in 1990, the Goldman Environmental Prize awards $750,000 annually to environmental heroes from the world’s six continental regions. — Steve Lerner

Zen Torts

It’s hard to imagine any professional group more in need of a little Zen than lawyers. From May 16-21, the monks of the Tassajara Zen Mountain Center in Big Sur will be welcoming a group of lawyers seeking both inner piece and credits towards their Minimum Continuing Legal Education requirements.

The attorneys may find the retreat a challenge. Located up a rough 14-mile dirt road in the remote Ventana Wilderness, Tassajara has no cell phone reception, no fax or email, and only a single phone for an average of 80 guests.

Covering basic issues of legal management, the course will also discuss ethics, detection/prevention of substance abuse, and elimination of bias in the profession — all required for California Bar members. The week-long session will be taught by Mary Mocine, a Zen priest who practiced law for 18 years and now leads a dharma group for lawyers, and Susan B. Jordan, a Mendocino-based civil rights and defense attorney best known for defending SLA terrorist-cum-Minnesota soccer-mom Kathleen Soliah. For more information, contact Mary Mocine at marymo@att.net or the San Francisco Zen Center at (415) 863-3136. www.sfzc.org — Elisa Williams

It’s the Pits

Residents of the bucolic town of Livermore find themselves sitting on a potential plutonium powder keg. The Bush administration, seemingly hell-bent on re-igniting the nuclear arms race, wants the Lawrence Livermore National Labs (LLNL) to help its sister lab in Los Alamos, New Mexico, crank out the grapefruit-sized plutonium “pits” designed to trigger thermonuclear weapons.

Under this plan, LLNL would build a Modern Pit Facility (MPF) to turn out 250 to 900 plutonium pits a year. This would require doubling the lab’s existing plutonium stockpiles to 1.5 tons which, according to the Tri-Valley Herald, “would turn Livermore into the world’s sixth largest nuclear power.” It also could place Livermore on the “must-hit list” for freelance terrorists.

When the DOE filed its draft Environmental Impact Statement, it revealed for the first time that the proposed facility would produce “new design pits” — i.e., it would develop new types of mega-atomic weapons.

The National Nuclear Security Administration’s 2,500-page planning document calls for building a weapons-grade plutonium-separation facility at LLNL, and the DOE predicts that it will increase ten-fold the radiation exposure to people living near the lab.

But the Bush administration’s new bomb plant may not be opening — at least, not this year. A storm of public opposition compelled Sen. Dianne Feinstein to cut the program budget in half, thus derailing the bomb factory. Feinstein observed that, even if the proposed facility only ran at half-capacity, its first year’s output would surpass the entire nuclear arsenal of China. On January 28, the DOE announced an “indefinite” delay for MPF.

The public comment period on plans for building the MPF runs through May 27 with a final decision slated for January 2005. — Gar Smith

Deadlier Livermore

Last December, a federal district court banned the Department of Energy (DOE) from shipping “select agents” to its sprawling Lawrence Livermore National Labs (LLNL) nuclear research facility. The “select agents” included live anthrax, botulism, bubonic plague, and a host of other deadly pathogens that were to serve as a “starter kit” for a new DOE bio-war lab.

The DOE claims that it wants to tinker with ebola, plague, and anthrax for purely defensive purposes, but Title 42 of the US Code clearly states that “select agents have historically been associated with weaponizing effects.”

Building a bio-war lab inside a nuclear weapons plant strikes most folks as a supremely boneheaded idea, but the DOE has already constructed a similar lab at its Los Alamos Nuclear Labs in New Mexico. (When the Los Alamos citizenry kicked up a ruckus, DOE halted plans to open it.)

Meanwhile, construction continues on the Livermore lab. Marylia Kelly, director of the watchdog group Tri-Valley CARES, remains alarmed that the Bay Area’s bio-lab lies “adjacent to the active Los Positas earthquake fault and next to a large metropolitan area.” Kelley has a personal stake in the outcome. She lives across the street from LLNL.

There are four safety levels for bio-toxin research, ranging from Biosafety Level-1 (noninfectious) to Biosafety Level-4 (deadly and incurable). The Livermore lab would be a Level-3 site. If allowed to open, Livermore’s bio-war lab would not only conduct experiments with natural pathogens, it would also toy with genetically modified anthrax, botulism, and bubonic plague. The site would include a special “spray room” where as many as 100 animals could be subjected to “aerosol challenges.”

Last August, Tri-Valley CARES sued the DOE for a raft of violations including failure to address the project’s environmental impacts. The ban on shipping bio-toxins continues until the Oakland Federal Court issues a ruling in May. — GS

Malling the Farm

UC Berkeley wants to replace the historic Gill Tract, a patch of farmland three miles northwest of campus, with a shopping mall. The 14-acre tract (part of the 77-acre University Village) just happens to be the last, largest parcel of living farmland in the East Bay. And, for much of the past 100 years, the Gill Tract has been farmed organically.

The tract’s pine and palm woodlands and two native streams shelter monarch butterflies, rare and endangered tree frogs, salamanders, and garter snakes. Steelhead trout have been sighted in the creeks.

UCB says it needs to build more student housing in a “vibrant mixed-use university neighborhood.” The mixed-uses would include banks, offices, a “gourmet liquor store,” and a 72,000-square-foot supermarket.

The plan calls for demolishing 412 student units that rent for $768 a month and replacing them with more than 1,000 apartments priced at $1,366 (too pricey for the average student). Unlike existing units, the replacements would be off-limits to families with children.

Even UCB’s Director of Housing has testified that “if we just fixed up the [existing] units, we could keep rents lower for 15 years.” But doubling the rents and the number of rental units promises to fatten UCB’s bottom line. The university would also rake in gobs of rental revenue from leasing scores of commercial storefronts.

Urban Roots, a coalition of community groups, university staff, and environmentalists, proposed a plan to save the farm by creating a “European village” with “bustling public plazas,” orchard courtyards, rooftop gardens, narrow streets, and pedestrian bridges “over creeks and between rooftops.” The design would safeguard the farm while meeting UCB’s housing goals and adding 100,000 square feet of commercial space. With year-round rotation, the farm could produce 10 tons of food annually, enhancing the local economy by providing both jobs and crops.

The university dismissed the alternative, ruling that the site was not “farmland of significant local importance” (even though 15 neighboring families routinely grow vegetables on the land and 50 local schools use it as a teaching site). The Gill Tract is not only an agricultural research station, it has also served as a community farm, employing at-risk youth to grow food for homeless families. Environmentalists note that the Gill Tract captures and filters winter rain and purifies the local air year-round. Studies show that paving the land would increase air pollution over state-permitted limits.

California author and farmer Michael Abelman (On Good Land: The Autobiography of an Urban Farm) asks the essential question: “We can all survive without another condominium, Taco Bell, or shopping center, [but] can we really survive without fertile soils, without fresh and unpoisoned food?” www.gilltract.com — GS

Hats Off, Pay What You Want

The hot-as-a-pistol Shotgun Players, one of the Bay Area’s most innovative thespian troupes, is roaring back from a string of critically acclaimed, sold-out performances with a 2004 season where admission to all shows is free. Yes, free.

Berkeley’s Shotgun Players aren’t flush with cash, and they aren’t stupid, but you could call them revolutionary. Still reeling from the critically acclaimed production of Mark Jackson’s The Death of Meyerhold, which filled theaters in late 2003 and early 2004, they’re betting that appreciative guests will drop more in the hat after the shows than they would spend on tickets at the door. This new strategy is also designed to reach those with limited means.

Is this the best of Free Enterprise (”quality will triumph in a free marketplace, particularly when aided by Capitalist donations”) or Optimistic Socialism (”when people work together for a common good, all benefit”)?

Either way, it’s a daring artistic gambit. Rarely do the arts obey the laws of economics. Movies are priced the same whether the films are flops or win Oscars. Books drop in price when they hit the Best Seller List or the Bargain Bin. Musicians are often most popular when they’re very new or very dead. And then there’s theater, where price so often has an inverse relationship to quality.

It’s a bold strategy for the resourceful Shotgun Players who got their start in 1992 when 11 people put on a play in the basement of a pizza parlor. After winning a variety of theater awards over the years while hopping between venues (including a stint in downtown Berkeley at the abandoned UC Theater Cinema), they are now the resident theater company at the Julia Morgan Center for the Arts.

Upcoming 2004 productions include Doug Wright’s Quills, a 1995 play about the last days of the Marquis de Sade (opening June 7); Bertold Brecht’s epic theater masterpiece, The Caucasian Chalk Circle; Liz Duffy Adams’ dark comedy called Dog Act, and Tom Stoppard’s witfest, Travesties, a play celebrating some wild encounters with Vladimir Lenin, James Joyce, and Dadaist Tristan Tzara in 1917 Zurich. If you want to avoid potentially long ticket queues the night of the show, you can buy annual memberships for between $50-$150, based on what you think one is worth. If the Shotgun’s gamble works, theater lovers of all economic persuasions should benefit.

Contact: Julia Morgan Center for the Arts, 2640 College Avenue in Berkeley. (510) 704-8210 www.shotgunplayers.org — EW

Banking Green

What are the odds that 20 young San Francisco activists could successfully change environmental policies at the world’s largest bank? In January, after four years of grassroots organizing by Rainforest Action Network (RAN), Citigroup adopted landmark environmental policies that RAN executive director Michael Brune calls “the strongest...yet of any private financial institution in the world.”

Citigroup has agreed to stop funding logging operations in tropical rainforests and to impose severe investment restrictions on oil, gas, logging, and mining operations in all endangered ecosystems worldwide. It also has promised to increase investment in renewable energy projects and help its clients reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

RAN followed the money trail that implicated the bank in environmentally destructive policies. It also enlisted Hollywood celebrities such as Susan Sarandon, Daryl Hannah, and Tim Robbins to make TV ads asking the public to cut up their Citibank cards to protest bank-funded cutting of forests from the Amazon to Africa to Northern California. Now RAN’s Global Finance Campaign, led by Ilyse Hogue, wants to shift the entire global financial system towards policies of sustainability and ecological restoration.

It’s good news that powerful corporations like Citigroup are not immune to the will of progressive, citizen-led movements. The bad news is that, even on the heels of RAN’s victory for sustainability, House Republicans on the Ways and Means Committee retaliated by launching an investigation of RAN. They have threatened to rewrite the rules for the tax-exempt organizations that make use of the long-standing American tradition of nonviolent direct action in the face of injustice. The House is also investigating People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

Undaunted, RAN’s Global Finance Campaign has challenged “the Liquidators” — top U.S. banks (including JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America) to “meet or beat” the terms of Citigroup’s shift by Earth Day. “Long-term investments in ecological and social sustainability,” says Hogue “is the only path to ensure the future health of the global economy.” www.ran.org — Allan Hunt Badiner (Note: The author serves on the Board of Directors for Rainforest Action Network).

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