The annual Watershed Environmental Poetry Festival returns. Details below.
October 2004 | Dock of the Bay
Blowback in the Wind
You wouldn’t send a firefighter into a burning house without a coat and helmet. But would you consent to family and friends fighting in Iraqi combat zones dusted with depleted uranium (DU)? Not if you know what nuclear whistleblower Leuren Moret knows.
Moret was a geoscientist at the Livermore Nuclear Weapons Lab when the first Gulf War erupted in 1991. Inside the lab, it was understood that DU weapons were far from “depleted.” They were low-level radioactive weapons with a long-term killing capacity, and they were intentionally introduced into the US arsenal to blur the distinction between conventional and nuclear arms. As Richard Berta, the Department of Energy’s Western Regional Inspector, once told Moret: “The Pentagon exists for the oil companies, and the nuclear weapons labs exist for the Pentagon.”
Shortly after that conversation, Moret left the lab. She has since become one of the world’s leading experts on the history and health impacts of DU weapons. The first Gulf War is often touted as a “bloodless victory” for the US since there were only 110 American casualties. But Moret points out that more than a third of the 700,000 troops who survived the conflict are now severely disabled by a bizarre range of diseases. Eerily, the spouses of many soldiers appear to have developed similar symptoms, and the children of these war vets are being born with unusual deformities.
Despite the deceptive name, Moret cautions, DU weapons are, in reality, “weapons of mass destruction.” On impact, DU shells explode into fiery clouds of radioactive dust emitting cell-damaging Alpha particles. A single gram of DU releases more than 12,000 Alpha particles per second. The particles enter the body through the lungs, skin and digestive track. In Iraq, birth defects, cancers and childhood leukemias are claiming victims in unprecedented numbers. Babies are being born without brains, without skin, without limbs, without heads.
After listening to Moret’s disturbing testimony, members of the Marin Peace and Justice Coalition decided to make human rights history with a resolution that, in part, reads: “In view of those dangers posed by exposure to depleted uranium, Marin County requires that all Marin residents serving in the US Armed Forces and its Reserves be prohibited from serving in those areas where DU weaponry is used.”
As Moret notes, DU contamination is a global issue. It remains radioactive for 250,000 years. The winds blowing DU dust through Nasariya will one day come home to roast. To learn more: call (415) 721-2844. — Gar Smith
A Watershed Event
For nine years, the annual Watershed Environmental Poetry Festival has annually supported sustainable futures by honoring the natural world with native words. Hosted by Poetry Flash magazine, this green slam debuted in Golden Gate Park. Later, at the invitation of the Berkeley Ecology Center, it moved to the East Bay. In 1995, Former US Poet Laureate Robert Hass and the activists at Berkeley’s International Rivers Network crossed currents to create a truly watershed event — the popular children’s poetry and art contest called “River of Words.”
Today, the Watershed Environmental Poetry Festival remains a free fˆete for artists and environmentalists, teachers and kids, families and friends. Taking center stage this year, says organizer Mark Baldridge, will be poets Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Robert Hass, Pattiann Rogers, George Keithley, Lucille Lang Day, Marc Bamuthi Joseph, and environmentalist Peter Warshall. Kathryn Roszak’s Anima Mundi Dance Company will perform a work based on Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Fifth Book of Peace.
Festivities at Berkeley’s Civic Center Park are preceded by the traditional “Creek Walk,” tracing the course of a renowned Berkeley watershed. Strawberry Creek flows from the hills and meanders through the UC campus only to disappear into a city culvert that eventually empties into the Bay. The Creek Walk will focus on “daylighting” this waterway. At several points, local poets will read, and restoration advocates will discuss efforts to uncover and revive the creek. At the festival site, the water, which runs directly under the park, will be “miked” so that its murmurings will accompany readings from the stage.
“In our towns and cities,” Peter Warshall observes, “two essential sources of life — water to drink and soil to grow food — remain hidden from our eyes. Ancient streams are buried beneath housing and soil has become a filler between, gas, water and electric piping.” Watershed consciousness, he adds, aims to remove layers of industrial artifice and reestablish our human connection with the natural world that sustains us.
In addition to “consciousness of stream” poetry, a River Village will offer visitors a range of interactive arts, all-ages nature activities, and exposure to literary and grassroots organizations such as River of Words, Bay Nature, Berkeley Creeks Collective, California Poets in the Schools, East Bay Depot for Creative Reuse, Haight-Ashbury Journal, Sca-rlet Tanager Press, and the Shorebird Nature Center. Festivities run from noon to 5pm, Saturday, October 2, at Civic Center Park, Martin Luther King, Jr. Way and Center St. For more info: See this month’s Calendar, or visit www.poetryflash.org — Gary Gach
Art Overboard!
If you told artists Judith Selby and Richard Lang that their careers are all washed up, they’d probably take it as a complement. As proprietors of Gallery Route One in Point Reyes Station, Selby and Lang are renowned for fashioning colorful artworks from the debris flushed onto local beaches by Earth’s trash-ladened oceans. Their work gives new resonance to the phrase “art collection.” During one five-month stretch in 2001, they collected 4,300 pounds of plastic trash from Kehoe Beach — a spit of sand on the ocean side of Point Reyes. Picking up where (and what) others left off, the prolific pair wash, separate, and categorize the sea-drenched detritus by type and color.
Their sea-grassroots census of floating waste has turned up plastic pop bottles, six-pack rings, plastic utensils, combs, and soda straws. The tide also brings in a non-biodegradable host of bobbing surprises including shotgun wadding, cigarette lighters, toothbrushes, tampon applicators, and black plastic spacer tubes from busted oyster cages.
Turning all this flotsam and jetsam into high art (or, at least, tall art, since some of their sculptures tower over the average beachcomber) takes a mix of artistic vision and sea-legged endurance. Not even Marcel Duchamp would have had the patience to turn hefty bags of petrochemical spindrift into multicolored towers of rubber gloves, balloon rings, soup-bowl fragments and poly-propylene rope.
And, yes, the-re’s a message in all those plastic bottles — a towering testimony to mankind’s pro-pensity to pollute. “People use that word ‘disposable’ as if [once] you use it... it’s gone,” Selby observes. But “it’s not gone. It’s somewhere, and it’s there for a long time.” Kehoe Beach, after all, is but a small portion of the Earth’s coastal bib. And Lang has seen photos of plastic waste piled shoulder-high on otherwise deserted Pacific islands. Somewhere, as you read this, a seagull is building a nest out of humanity’s plastic garbage.
Selby and La-ng have inspired many gallery vi-sitors to bag their own sea-trash, and they let them use their glue guns to create overboard art. But the real goal is to inspire (or shame) the producers and proliferators to stop using the oceans as a communal dump. Enough mal-de-mer! Sea for yourself: Starting November 1 at the San Francisco Bay Model Visitor Center, 2100 Bridgeway, Sausalito. Hours: 9am-4pm, Tues.-Sat. (415) 332-3871
The artists, Richard and Judith Selby Lang, can be reached by phone at (415) 488-1818. — GS
Fox News Is Faux News
AlterNet, the San Francisco-based syndicated news outlet, is used to making waves but its latest broadside has raised a tsunami that has rattled Fox Media and left its owner Rupert Murdoch reaching for his dramamine... and his lawyers. AlterNet is suing Murdoch’s $7.8 billion media flagship for false advertising, claiming that its signature slogan, “Fair and Balanced,” is misleading and “notoriously mis-descriptive.”
AlterNet supports its claim by waving DVDs of Robert Greenwood’s new documentary, Outfoxed: Rupert Murdock’s War on Journalism. Greenwood’s film became an underground hit via grassroots screenings in private homes across America followed by a theatrical release in major US cities. When Outfoxed opened in New York’s Quad Cinema, it racked up the biggest weekend gross in the theater’s 30-year history. Time hailed it as sober and devastating; The New York Times called it “meticulous”; and the LA Daily News called it “thorough, dispassionate and damning.”
Echoing criticisms compiled in the AlterNet book, The Five Biggest Lies Bush Told Us About Iraq, the film adds compelling critical interviews with Republicans, Democrats and Independents, CIA experts, and government weapons inspectors. “The film,” says Don Hazen, AlterNet Executive Editor, “should give Fox and Rupert Murdoch the same kind of stomach ache that Fahrenheit 9/11 is giving to George Bush and Dick Cheney.”
To tell Goliath: “You go lieth” in a courtroom filled with Murdoch’s foxy suits, little AlterNet will have to raise a lot of loot. Greenwood and AlterNet have offered to send everyone who contributes $30, their very own DVD of Greenwood’s documentary. To learn more, visit www.fightfox.com. To chuck in some bucks to fight the media mucky-mucks, go to: www.alternet.org/donate/fightfox. — GS
Wastewater Wetlands
In 1974, an eco-visionary project began near Martinez, California. It created the West Coast’s first wastewater wetlands, and now stands as one of the great environmental success stories. Rather than constructing a deep-water outfall line and discharging sewage effluent into the Carquinez Straits (and, ultimately, San Francisco Bay), the Mountain View Sanitary District (MVSD) took a more sustainable approach. It reclaimed low-lying tidelands, constructed a series of ponds and marshes, and directed its treated wastewater into the wetlands.
Not only did the solution save local ratepayers millions of dollars, it also established a valuable 134-acre wetlands ecosystem that today supports more than 200 species of birds, fish and other wildlife. Birdwatchers report that the white pelican has returned to the area after a long absence.
What made this innovative project possible was the ultraviolet (UV) wastewater treatment system supplied by Trojan Technologies, which disinfects water using high-intensity lamps. Installed in 1994, the UV system replaced an earlier chlorine-based system. The change enabled MVSD to meet shallow-water discharge requirements that were unattainable with chlorine treatment.
UV removes the risk of toxic chemical spills, leaks, and chlorine residuals that could damage fragile ecosystems. Eliminating the use of acutely hazardous materials such as chlorine, sulfur dioxide, and ammonia gases not only improved workplace safety, it also meant that the MVSD was exempted from establishing a risk-management plan and installing expensive safety equipment.
MVSD also found that UV was far more cost-effective. It works 20 times faster than chlorine to destroy bacteria, viruses, micro-pollutants, and water-bourn pathogens (even chlorine-resistant Giardia and chryptosporidium). And unlike chlorine systems, UV treatment does not require costly feeders, chlorinators, metering pumps, storage tanks or extensive safety training.
The Martinez facility serves a population of about 25,000 residents. It treats an average of some 1.8 million gallons per day (MGD) and is capable of handling peak flows of up to 10 MGD. The wetlands project has become a model throughout North America and other parts of the world. Each year, more than 2,000 people visit the facility.
“Trojan UV works,” says MVSD Manager David Contreras. “It is safe, non-chemical, and environmentally friendly. It has allowed us to effectively and cost-efficiently manage our wastewater in a way that benefits the community, supports and sustains the environment, and enhances our quality of life.” UV treatment systems are now also available for under-the-sink installation in private homes. — Gordon Feller
Second Generation
This October’s 15th annual Bioneers conference mixes human ingenuity with the wisdom of the wild to create an environment of hope that’s within our grasp. Some of the brighter stars in the movement to save our planet will speak: Satish Kumar, Joan Blades, Paul Mohawk, Paul Hawken and Amy Goodman, to name a few. But there are also some names you probably won’t recognize, and that’s because they haven’t finished high school yet. But don’t mistake them for novices. Fifteeen-year old Chaille Stovall will screen his film Party Animals (or... How to Get the White House in Five Easy Steps), a look the 2000 election. It has already aired on HBO. Chaille was eleven when he made it.
The conference is expected to draw 3,000 people. More than 400 of them will be under 25, and that’s no accident. Four years ago, the idea for a youth program was hatched by Julia Butterfly Hill. Soon after, Kristin Rothballer, then 28, walked into the Santa Fe Bioneers office to say that it was time for an official youth program. Bioneers heeded the call and today Kristin oversees its burgeoning Youth Initiative.
This year, it will sponsor 150 youth scholars and educators who wouldn’t otherwise be able to attend. They will come from Canada and Nepal, Queens, NY and Isleta Pueblo. They will convene in the Youth Tent, which offers an open, energized and for networking, interactive workshops and intergenerational dialogue. The conference program includes youth-run workshops on media, indigenous leaders, organizing and sustainable activism. As past scholarship recipient, Jordan Lonegren notes “the reason Bioneers is so important is that it opens all of us again to that feeling of ‘wow’—that inspiration to make a difference.” — Mona Ausubel
For more information on the Bioneers Youth Initiative and for 2004 conference program visit: www.bioneers.org/youth.html.
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