Six Hundred Thousand Trees to Bite the Dust

For some time, although most residents of the East Bay Region have been unaware of it (and kept in the dark), the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has initiated plans to cut 600,000 trees from the East Bay ridge;. The plan includes areas stretching from Richmond through Hayward and some portions of Contra Costa County. The stumps, 600,000 of them, are to be treated twice a year for a ten-year period with Garlon and Glyphosate, cancer-causing products manufactured by Dow Chemical and Monsanto., which will leach into run off, ground water, and eventually major bodies of water. What constitutes tree-shaded wilderness with thousands of miles of trails are to be converted into grasslands. Actualized, the plan will result in severe erosion (it has already caused significant damage along certain stretches of Highway 13 which coincidentally runs on top of the Hayward Fault); it will raise the regional temperature and reduce moisture in the soils; it will adversely affect animal, bird, bat, butterfly and insect habitat; and it will not reduce fire hazard, although that of course is the rationale advanced to justify such a radical plan.

And, like the national movement to disappear library books (covered in my last newsletter) this plan to strip away wilderness extends to other areas of California as well.
 

Regional Park Meeting

 
Last  Tuesday, May 17, the Board of Directors of the East Bay Regional Parks held a meeting at their headquarters.  Public Comments were restricted to 3 minutes per speaker. I share my 3-minutes worth of comments below:

I am here today because it’s the 10^th anniversary of  Al Gore’s film, “An Inconvenient Truth.” According to NASA’s report last week, the planet’s air has gone beyond the tipping point of 350 PPM and now stands at 400 PPM.  No humans have ever existed before in this kind of atmosphere.
 
Atmosphere is a fancy word for the air you breathe, the Board members of the EBRPD breathes, and all the people in this Board Room room breathe. It is the air all living organisms on Earth breathe: marine animals, plants, and, including the soil bacteria and the bees which allow us and all other living things to eat.

There is no separate air conditioning for members of regional governments, city governments, and national governments. There is no separate air for the CEOs of Monsanto and Dow Chemical. The one thing left on Earth that remains democratic is air—the air everyone breathes.

We need full disclosure. What dollar amounts does the budget show for the Dow and Monsanto contracts negotiated by the EBRPD for this project? What does the budget show of the profits from the sale of wood chips and lumber to markets in China and Japan from this project?

The trees are the common property of all the citizens of the East Bay. They are our wilderness. As its owners, we have the right to determine the disposition of our property. We need to know who benefits from the destruction mandated by the FEMA clearcutting program affecting Richmond all the way to and including
Hayward and Contra Costa. We will use every means at our disposal to find out.

This planet is not the home of unlimited growth; it must not become the home of unlimited destruction.  This is not the moment to pollute our already polluted soils, watershed, and larger bodies of water with Dow and Monsanto cancer-causing chemicals.  We’ve been there, done that.

Which is why—if all living things are to avoid death by choking—we need to plant MORE trees. Trees are the lungs by which this home we live in breathes. This is not the place to cut 400,000 trees, not including the 200,000 more trees the UC has under its jurisdiction. Maybe on another planet. But not this one.

 More Information: 

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Overviews and Resources 

http://www.saveeastbayhills.org/

http://berkeleydailyplanet.com/issue/2016-04-08/article/44353?headline=UC-Plan-to-Cut-Trees-in-Strawberry-Canyon-and-Hills-for-Development-Threatens-Ecology---Merrilie-Mitchell

The Science:
http://milliontrees.me/

History and Toxicology:
http://www.eastbaypesticidealert.org/wpad.html

The Lawsuit and More History:
http://hillsconservationnetwork.org/

Art Action and More Science:
http://treespiritproject.com/sfbayclearcut/

Forest Photos and More Resources:
http://bapd.org/trees.html

Fire Hazards: conservation biologist David Theodoropoulos, retired firefighter Dave Maloney,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1i3RP7eDFc

High Burning Fuel (includes pictorial evidence):
https://milliontrees.me/2016/05/06/fire-scientist-says-eucalyptus-did-not-burn-with-high-intensities-leading-to-home-destruction/

August 2015 Hills Conservation Network protest against Sierra Club's FEMA-supporting lawsuit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8huWXwpJNOg 

WHAT YOU CAN DO:

SIGN ALL THREE PETITIONS:

Oakland-specific petition (almost 65,000 signatures already): http://www.thepetitionsite.com/174/979/908/the-east-bay-forests-around-your-home-are-slated-for-destruction/

Hills Conservation Network-specific petition: http://petitions.moveon.org/sign/stop-ucs-plan-to-deforest-1

Million Trees, SF Forest Alliance - Sierra Club-specific petititon: http://petitions.moveon.org/sign/sierra-club-must-stop

SUPPORT LEGAL ACTION: hillsconservationnetwork.org

JOIN:  https://lists.riseup.net/www/info/eastbayforests-info

or: 
defendeastbayforests@riseup.net

CULTURAL IRREVOLUTION

What the heck was I doing attending yet another cluster-fuck Berkeley Library Trustees Meeting last week? Taking notes, that’s what. Happily, back out in the street (free at last, free at last!) someone in the loop let me in on what’s really going on. Without my informant’s input, my article (see below) wouldn’t have had a spine. What the article doesn’t let you know, however, is that the City of Berkeley has launched an expensive investigation of any and all library whistle blowers, without whom, Berkeley would never have discovered the destruction by the former library director, Greg Scott, of 39,000 books, books paid for by the citizens of Berkeley, and therefore a theft of our commons.

What the article omits adding is that this theft of our history is happening in libraries nationwide.

Public and Library Employees Ignored by Berkeley Board of Library Trustees

In the home stretch of researching my latest book, I found myself consulting a 1969 issue of an anthropology publication archived in the Main Branch of the Berkeley Public Library, discovering what the people I had been writing about, the Juwasi (or San) of the Kalahari Desert really looked like. Before leaving the library, I browsed the reference room. I came upon an atlas of women travelers of the 19^th Century. Whoopee, I thought. Research done, proofs corrected, I’ll come back to have a serious look. A mere five months later, I found the reference room was stripped. The shelves were nearly as bereft as a mediaeval monk’s tonsure. What was going on?

I discovered 39,000 books had walked out the back door of the Berkeley Main Branch of the Public Library to be pulped. Rumor had it the pulp found its way into the manufacture of mattresses. I was given access to the database of the 19,000 last copies that had met their fate in the teeth of the shredders. I found a disproportion of titles about women and the women’s movement; about Blackness and the history of Black folk, and volumes on economy and politics. Did the library trustees have an agenda?

Since then I have regularly attended monthly meetings where the public is “invited” to interface with the Board of Library Trustees. My participation in these events was prompted by a lifetime of activism and a sense that with so much public indignation at the theft of our Berkeley commons, the Board of Library Trustees might be persuaded to shift their policies. Through the exertion of public pressure, Jeff Scott, the Library Director, whose trashing tenure lasted a bare 11 months (so much mayhem in so little time), was summarily dismissed. Surely things were bound to improve. And yet, nine months later, the same policies remain in force, notably both weeding and collections acquisitions remain in the hands of only two librarians answerable to the Manager of Collections; whereas formerly, librarian specialists had this responsibility each in their particular areas of expertise.

Last Wednesday’s meeting marks a water shed in the breakdown of relations between the trustees , the public and the library employees. Public commentary was restricted to one minute. Following the comment period, two representatives from Local 1021 shared a union notification of no confidence in the current Collections Manager; followed by two representatives from Local 1 who spoke in opposition.

It turns out at issue is a serious labor dispute which finds employee morale at an all time low. Yet throughout the proceedings I marveled at the trustees’ expressions of satisfaction and complacency. Could it be this state of affairs is exactly what they intend? The absence of many librarians for fear of retaliation was duly noted by many speakers. Could it be the trustees agenda is to make working conditions so unpleasant as to encourage older, better paid employees to quit? Recent union negotiations revolving around pay cuts across the board would seem to suggest that is exactly what is going on.

The same trustees who appear indifferent to employee intimidation, display similar indifference to the public. The most recent meeting suffered from lack of any sound amplification. Often speakers comments and directions by the Board secretary could not be heard. Most tellingly, the Board continues to stage these meetings at the Pittman branch, recently visited by the fire department which determined only 34 seats could be accommodated. All were occupied Wednesday, with another 34 people left standing for the nearly two hour long meeting duration—some of them senior citizens. 

Repeatedly, when the public has posed a question to this Board in good faith, it has been met with the assertion that the Board cannot answer questions. If in fact the Board is gagged, it follows that public is gagged as well, yet many questions continue to be asked of this board in what appears to be an ongoing and futile exercise by a public making comments that run off  the trustees like water off a duck’s back. If the trustees of the Berkeley Public Library are responsible neither to the employees nor the public, to whom are they responsible?

(Note: the Board answers to the Berkeley City Council. The concluding question is merely rhetorical.)

 What you can do to help stop Berkeley LibraryGate:

Here are resources you can use to get more involved in saving our books!

Rally highlights discrepancy in number of books weeded from Berkeley Public Library

Berkeley Public Library Trustees Website

Phone for Beth Pollard, Interim Director of Library Services, BOLT Secretary 510-981-6195

Contacting the Berkeley Public Library Trustees link

Save the Berkeley Public Library Books Website

Save the Berkeley Public Library Books Faqs page

Alameda County Library Lovers Facebook Page

TRUMPTON in 2016

CECILE PINEDA’S NEWSLETTER

“Pineda’s singular books perform dazzling literary feats of technique, history, and political responsibility. They display a range of technical sophistication that is hard to compare. To read Pineda is to touch on the miracle of humanity.”

                                                                                                —Marcus Embry

• READINGS AND BOOK SIGNINGS
• SOME THOUGHTS ON VOTING

READINGS AND BOOK SIGNINGS

I’ll be talking about two books, Love Queen of the Amazon, and Apology to a Whale: Words to Mend a World on Saturday, May 7 at 3:00 PM at Oakland’s Main Library, 125 14^th Street at Lakeshore Drive in Oakland.

What kinds of books get written in happy times and why can't we have those happy books when we move into less happy times? Your opinions are as good as mine!

SOME THOUGHTS ON VOTING

Either way, whether you’re allowed to vote for Trumpton or Tonoftrump, you will get the same old same old, only this time even worse: endless war; charity for the .0001%, and destitution for the other 99%, not just in the US but world over. UNLESS YOU WRITE IN BERNIE SANDERS. It may not do your country any good, but you will have asserted your own dignity, your own manumission, and your community’s manumission.

US voting looks more and more like a rat laboratory: stand in line for hours, lucky if you get to push the food pellet lever when you get to those pearly (and hacked) gates, and a piece of paper which says I VOTED TODAY (that’s the pellet).

Trumptonism (Trump + Clinton= Trumpton) is not a option. It is a symptom, the symptom of a collapsing civilization, the hollowing out of a society by centuries of imperialism, centuries of war, centuries of beggaring a population, many without food, clothing or housing—and above all without means of coping with a post-industrial, soon to be post-technical world because of ignorance brought on by mis-education where “classrooms” are propaganda tanks for the dissemination of national myths.

As a primarily right brain person, I resort to images for much of my thinking. I try to pay attention to where I see us today (and by us I mean homo saps). Before my eyes I hold the ruins of Chernobyl. For me it represents the image of decay, the faltering of planetary systems, the faltering of the imperial state, the faltering of my own cohort to the indifferent scything of old age itself.

RUINED CHERNOBYL REACTOR CORE

I see the State as hollowed out.  Its high court: corrupt; it education system: corrupt;

its legislative branch: corrupt; the executive: corrupt. Sandra Day O’Connor went on the record musing that maybe in retrospect she should not have cast her vote selecting George Bush in the selection theater of 2000. At the age of 86 she is rectifying that oversight by inventing video games—to teach kids civic responsibility, according to the March 28, 2016 crusty New York Times. As they say in the scrivening biz, you can’t make this stuff up.

Recently I heard Micah White speak. Micah White of Adbusters fame, of Zuccotti Park-Occupy fame. His view is that NO ACTION CAN BE EFFECTIVE UNLESS IT DECLARES SOVEREIGNTY. His formula asks the question: are marches effective? Are petitions effective? Are demonstrations effective? Vigils? And if not, why not? Because empire is tone deaf to petitioning.

I  happen to agree with Micah White. EMPIRES ARE NOT CHARITABLE INSTITUTIONS. But marches, demonstrations, vigils, protests IF THEY ARE WIDELY PUBLICIZED EDUCATE a segment of the population that does not walk by with blinders over their eyes, that may notice (out of their peripheral vision to be sure) that some folks are discontent. And of those few, even fewer may begin to wonder why. Moving a population as numb and dumbed down as this one takes a very very long time and lots and lots of sticktoitiveness. But it is NOT ENOUGH.

What would be effective? In my view, to counter the neocon agenda, the LANGUAGE OF RESISTANCE MUST BE REVERSED. If we cannot entertain DEMANDS, what then? We can have expectations OF OURSELVES. Intensions, Goals. Ambitions. But if we talk of self-determination, we remain mired in the cult of the self. Of individualism.

What then? Here are some nouns: people; popular. mass; massive; common; communal; group; collective.

Here are some indirect objects: determination; manumission; articulation; integration.

We can combine these nouns and indirect objects, but to do so we need verbs, and no verbs are possible without ACTION. What are these verbs? We can DECLARE; we can OCCUPY. We can BUILD alternatives.

Now we need direct objects: streets, cities, banks, corporations, farms; factories; workers collectives; cooperative groceries, cooperative transportation sharing; cooperative energy sharing. We can shift our energies to creating new realities in microquantities. We can begin coloring in the coloring book of our time and place. Much of it is colored in already. We need to expand the areas, intensify the colors.

So far the ground work has been laid:

The occupy movement articulated the concept of economic disparity, and gave it a name: the 1 percent; the 99 percent.

The blacklivesmatter movement extending to the brownlivesmatter movement has articulated a position exposing the extension of the antebellum plantation in the form of police street lynchings; mass incarceration, and mass deportation.

The Bernie Sanders campaign has become a spokespeople, articulating popular aspirations. It must continue, regardless of Act Three of the 2016 Election Theater.

We must make demands of OURSELVES: Fearlessness: willingness to face police terror, sound canons, microwave canons, live rounds. Willingness to speak truth, remind OURSELVES who we are, what we stand for. Willingness to educate sufficient numbers so that no number of arrests (over 1,000 in DC recently) and no amount of carnage can possibly deter us.

When Trumpton is elected, we don’t have to move to Canada. We can BE Canada.

CECILE PINEDA’S NEWSLETTER

CECILE PINEDA’S NEWSLETTER

“Pineda’s singular books perform dazzling literary feats of technique, history, and political responsibility. They display a range of technical sophistication that is hard to compare. To read Pineda is to touch on the miracle of humanity.”

                                                                                                —Marcus Embry

• READINGS AND BOOK SIGNINGS
• THE LIVING EARTH
• GOINGS ON AT CITY HALL

READINGS AND BOOK SIGNINGS

 I’ll be talking about Apology to a Whale in April and May at U.C. Berkeley, at the Ethnic Studies Library, 30 Stevens Hall, on Wednesday April 20 at 5:30, and in May at Oakland’s Main Library, 125 14^th Street at Lakeshore Drive in Oakland on Saturday, May 7, at 3:30 PM.

I love talking about this book, because it asks questions. For example, to create a life-sustaining world, how radically would we have to change our thinking? As I wrote it, section by section, its discoveries kept surprising me. Its central theme, the encounter between the Mind of the West and the indigenous mind, runs through it much like an underground river, silent at times, at other times making its rumbling felt.

February 1, 2016 I shared some thoughts about Apology to a Whale with S.F. Occupy Forum in San Francisco (view video here):  

THE LIVING EARTH

The comparative linguistics work of Benjamin Whorf anchors Apology to a Whale, lending it the kind of underpinnings that pull the themes together; it suggests some ways we might re-envision our thinking about the world and how we live within it.  Whorf based much of his study on indigenous languages, Hopi in particular.  As an alternative example of world view, he describes how the Hopi see clouds as alive. Lately this 2014 NASA video “The Earth – a Living Creature” a came to my attention. Maybe the Hopi have a point.  

The Effects of Good Government

GOINGS ON AT CITY HALL

 The City Council of Berkeley saw fit to honor my work as a literary artist on April 5^th, going so far to proclaim it “Cecile Pineda Day.” The statement I prepared took more than my allotted “3 minutes” to read because of frequent interruptions by the clapping and cheering of overflow crowd of outraged Berkeley citizens, there to oppose this council’s latest plans to demolish entire flatland sections of Berkeley in their relentless pandering to developers:

Watch video at 12:35!

I am  quite happy to accept this honor from the City of Berkeley for my efforts as a cultural worker, especially from a council which recently passed a resolution urging the closure of a nuclear reactor—Diablo Canyon—which sits atop a fine network of connecting faults, a fact  PGE knew as early as the 1960s but kept secret from the public till last year.

But if the Berkeley City Council is serious about honoring its artists, it must remember that the role of a true artist is to afflict the comfortable, and comfort the afflicted. It must reconsider its draconian approach to homelessness; it must take responsibility for the library directors it appoints, insuring that 39,000 more books—books which are the commons of the citizens of Berkeley—have no more chances of walking out the library back door to be pulped. It must guard and preserve the lungs by which it breathes and moderates its climate by protecting the 600,000 East Bay Hills trees designated for the FEMA ax, and Monsanto’s herbicides. It must quit selling out its city block by flatland block to the vulture flock of developers who settle in for a killing; it must regulate rents now so that people unable to afford the new “market rate” apartment rents are not evicted from existing housing stock because of rising rents. It must provide affordable housing for those displaced by the stampede to build market-rate apartments; it must not permit the Zoning Adjustment Board to rubber stamp 18-story-high-rise projects without having so much as looked at the engineering report. It must understand that one of Berkeley’s last remaining cultural vestiges is the Shattuck theater; it must protect its citizens from gross incursions by the university of California; and it must learn to value its Black community by not displacing it under the veneer of gentrification. It must understand finally that the concepts of wise government go back to the 14^th century where its effects are vividly laid out in the council chambers of the city of Siena by Ambrogio Lorenzetti, an artist whose work was deliberately commissioned by its citizens to remind the council it must govern wisely and well, in the interest of promoting a healthy society endowed with both compassion and civic responsibility.

Thank you very much.

Cecile Pineda, Berkeley, April 5, 2016

God is watching: Dogs and ponies don’t make the cut in SF

For the past couple of weeks, Washington in its great wisdom sent a DOJ subsidiary which calls itself COPS (Community Oriented Policing Services) to stage a series of three town halls designed to pour oil on San Francisco’s tense racial waters. By its own admission the COPS is a recommending body, a body without teeth. “Experts” all, it takes this body 18 months to cobble together their assessment at taxpayer expense. They make recommendations and release their findings 18 months later. I attended one of these sessions, last Monday, March 7, 2016.

Eighteen months is a long time. How many more black and brown people will be gunned down by the gangs of rogue cops on the blood stained streets of San Francisco in that time? At the present rate of blood sacrifice we can expect that up to 28 mothers may lose their sons.

The “town hall” strategy has been used by the SFPD over many years. As a general rule, such a panel or commission consists of white people pulling down middle class salaries. In my limited experience, the approach of these commissions or panels is utterly to ignore the high level of rage and mourning for loved ones present at any such hearing. Perhaps the rationale is that by ignoring such  feelings they will automatically dissipate. The reaction, however, is that far from dissipating them, it serves to intensify them, for two reasons: people feel their intelligence is being insulted, and people feel their grieving is being discounted.

Here’s what the 3/7/16 town hall was like: The spokesperson in charge mounted the Mission H.S. podium at 6:00 PM. Reading from a prepared script, making ample use of words like “partnership,” “ community policing,” “approved practices,” she spread great puddles of platitudes like warm mustard plaster over a thinly scattered audience while their eyes glazed, and restless stirrings were audible. The mic was turned over to another speaker who addressed more specific San Francisco-related issues, underscoring that “we are here to ‘listen.’ Taken in toto, these rhetorical exercises lasted 15 minutes of the allocated 2 hour time slot.

Next a huckster dripping sincerity and snake oil, took over. He asked the audience to yell out answers to specific questions: what was the issue people most wanted to talk about.

“Murder.” “Fire Chief Suhr.” “Justice for Mario Woods.” The roar reached such a pitch trying to isolate any of these shouts became impossible.

Another such exercise followed, with people all screaming at once to answers elicited from a set of questions illegible on the projected power point—even from the first row. It struck me these exercises had all the subtlety of tossing slabs of meat to safely caged lions. Indeed the COPS had come to listen, but listen to what? Was this a technique borrowed from group therapy sessions designed to encourage people to vent, and doing so, defuse the rage already evident in the room?

Next, speakers were enjoined to line up in both right and left aisles with mic stands provided for the purpose.  Each speaker was given a generous five minutes (as opposed to the last town hall which restricted people to three). Some 40 people spoke

“Who in DC  sent you here?” one speaker wanted to know. It was the only question pointed at this collection of carpet baggers, some of whom located themselves in distant areas of the auditorium. “Why are you here? Why are we talking to the B team when we need the A team to come out here?” And as might be expected, he received no straight answer. “We want Chief Suhr fired, we want rogue cops jailed for murder. We want Loretta Lynch out here to conduct an investigation.”

“Why is Chief Suhr here? He’s here at the behest of Mayor Lee to clear low-income neighborhoods for developers to come in and make this city unaffordable for anyone other than folks making 6 figures.”

I learned a lot from listening to the speaker array. Chief Suhr (pronounced sir, as in yessir!)has been charged for conspiring to obstruct an investigation into police violence in 2013; and demoted twice, once for mishandling a G-8 protest. and once for failing to file a report of an episode of domestic violence involving a friend.

The population of black people living in the city is down to 3% (from 10% in the days when the Fillmore had not yet undergone “urban renewal”) and that proportion of 3% makes up 40% of all of San Francisco arrests. Does that single statistic require a rocket scientist to parse??

I learned to what degree the SF Police has become a terrorist body, protecting their own, clouded in a code of silence, promoting the terrorist darlings of the chief, who himself climbed out of the recruitment ooze, appointed by terrorists before him. I learned about the pipeline from catholic school that guarantees 90K jobs to rookies fit for nothing but the football field, and the mean streets of SF. All these years, white people have been congratulating ourselves that we live in the most progressive area of the country, but the SFPD is so corrupt, it could do Mississippi proud.

Washington is scared. It knows the facts. And after the exoneration yesterday of the four rogue cops who drilled Alex Nieto’s body with 59 bullets, claiming he was threatening them with a taser, it should be scared. Because Alex Nieto’s wrist bone was found by the coroner to be IN HIS POCKET. Washington knows that people can be pushed only so far. And when they’re pushed to the brink, it becomes necessary to provide them with the illusion that the sensitively named COPS is there to listen.

And what will we do about it? Next time DC sends out their defusing team, several strategies involving changing the space are possible. 1) Take over the stage. En masse.  Encourage the shamsters to sit in the audience and listen. Then, moderate ourselves so as not all to talk at once. One of the ways to do that is to agree to structuring the meeting as a spokescouncil. 2) Walk out. DO NOT PARTICIPATE. Better theater is to be had out in the streets, away from dog and pony shows. In the streets, what you see is what you get.

Over late dinner last Monday night, through the plate glass windows giving on Valencia Street in the Mission District’s heart, I watched some 23 luxury, double decker buses roll by, their tinted windows glowing with eerie blue lights, ferrying the techies home to their luxury SF condos from Silicon Valley’s 12-hour days, safely insulated from having to see people being assassinated in San Francisco’s blood-stained streets, oblivious that the high rent they’re able to pay is driving out San Francisco’s working class.

Back in the East Bay, I hail a cab home. “Been to the theater?” my Somali cabbie asks me.  “Yes,” I tell him, “but not the usual kind.” I give him details. “Assassination,” he says. “Genocide. But God is watching,” he assures me.

In Somalia they still call a  spade a spade.

INTERNATIONAL WOMEN-HAVE-FAR-TO-GO DAY

Scheduled appearances

March 8 at 3:30 PM. International Women’s Day. Omega Salvage, 2403 San Pablo between Channing & Dwight in Berkeley.

I will be sharing reflections about women’s role “saving the world.” connected with Apology to a Whale: Words to Mend a World.

April 5 at 7 PM. City of Berkeley Temporary Council Chambers, 1222 University Ave. . The City of Berkeley will honor Cecile Pineda for a life-time achievement as a literary artist.

April 7 at 3:30 PM Doubletree Hilton, Denver Colorado: NACCs panel

Colonialism, Environmental Justice, Land Politics within Chicana/o Studies discusses Apology to a Whale: Words to Mend a World.

Rescheduled -  Ethnic Studies Library, 30 Stephens Hall,  UC Berkeley – schedule now tentative until UC Labor dispute is resolved.

---

MARCH 8 IS DESIGNATED THIS YEAR for us to celebrate Internal Women’s Day by the folks who do the designating. I hope they’re women, but given the neocon state of things, everything these days is up for grabs.

Omega Savage at 2403 San Pablo Between Channing and Dwight in Berkeley is putting on a day-long extravaganza—weather permitting!—this next Tuesday, March 8.

Here’s the line up:

3:30-4:30 Cecile Pineda/ Author (and feminist, I  might add)

4:30-5:00 Rybree/ Musician

5:00-5:45 Toby Blome'/ Code Pink Sisters/activist

5:45-6:15 Hali Hammer/ Musician/Activist

6:30-8:30 Alice Pennes / Art Project

6:15-6:45 Barbara Lubin/Mecca for Peace 

6:45-7:30 Andrea Pritchett/Musician/Activist

7:30-8:00 Gussie & Grits/Musician

8:30 ish Shirley Smallwood (during break for Dirty Cello)         /Musician/Storyteller

8:00-9:00 Dirty Cello/Musician

I’d venture to guess that most of the women listed above would not only describe themselves as feminists, but I know most of them to be activists as well. Trouble-makers. Trumpeniks, (no relation) as we say in Williamsburg.

Someone is probably gonna push me on stage at 3:30 (weather permitting) so I got to thinking I ought to give what I say  some thought.

In his tragimentary, Michael Moore, a rabid feminist, interviews Vigdis Finnbogadottir, Iceland’s first woman president (1980-1996). It’s conceivable she speaks with some authority when she says: “Women are going to save the world—if the world can be saved.”

Everybody who is anybody, and almost everybody who is a woman, knows that already. There’s lots of speculation about why that is, things like it comes with lactation, parturition, or caregiving. etc. etc.  You don’t have to lactate to be a woman, and you don’t have to care about the planet (necessarily) if you know how to lactate.

Based on my review of articles published and filed by me over the past 5 years women’s activism saving the world, falls into four main areas: agriculture, women’s health, economics, peace and peace advocacy. I reviewed work being done by women world-wide and in the United States. World-wide emphasis stresses such environmental issues as soils, water, seeds, land reclamation, and disaster relief. In the Untied States, emphasis is on reform of law enforcement, and on women’s health issues. Peace-making, and de-militarization are well represented both in the U.S. and world-wide.

World-wide, 80% of the world’s agriculture is done by women. Millions of women care about soil, and the health of soil; they care about the quality of water. They care about seeds. “Saving seeds is the heart of peasant culture,” to quote an article published by Popular Resistance, Nov. 7, 2015. They care about cultural preservation. This is true of indigenous people’s movements such as Idle-No-More, and including such seed-saving groups as We Are the Solution, based in Senegal, with related groups in

Ghana, Guinea, Burkina Faso, and Mali; and Sarayaku, a Kichwa tribe village in Ecuador, whose woman-led movement sued the Ecuadorian Government in the Inter-American Court of Human Rights to stop military and corporations from clearing their land for oil development. They care about the forest, the Amazon to be specific, because without healthy forests, there can be no healthy soil—or healthy air for that matter.

Leading figures in such movements are Vandana Shiva, who strongly advocates against monocultures and whose foundation, Navdanya,  works to save seeds; and the late Wangari Maahtai, whose Green Belt Movement planted over a million trees in Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Lesotho, Malawi, and Zimbabwe.

In the United States, attention is now focused on a case to be heard on the SCOTUS’ upcoming calendar. It has attracted intensive notice because it promises to have as wide-reaching consequences as Roe vs. Wade. It even scores a hashtag : #stopthesham. The American war against women is being waged on the health care front , the incarceration front and the economic front. Women in the U.S. are the fastest growing incarcerated population. Battles are being waged in such notorious prisons and detention centers as Hutto Detention Facility in Texas, (which facilitates deportation of abused women seeking political asylum) and Florida’s Lowell Correction Institution , which prostitutes women prisoners. More women-centered advocacy is needed on behalf of incarcerated women and their families. Skirmishes are being fought on the legal front, in a number of states where anti-choice policies lead to widespread arrest and forced intervention of pregnant women; and against abortion providers. One in 4 U.S. women can’t afford abortion, and 97% of rural counties have no  abortion provider. Women-led organizations such as Planned Parenthood and support networks for women released from incarceration are fighting defensive actions.

On the economic front, 24% of women world-wide earn less than men for the same work; two thirds (2/3) of American women make under $10,000 yearly, and the tax structure, and neocon-inspired austerity cuts impact women and their children disproportionately. Despite the work of prominent women economists, such as Marilyn Waring, women’s domestic work has yet to be counted in most nations’ GNP.

Peacemaking and de-militarization activism seems to be well represented by women in the United States and world-wide. Of issues affecting women, such representation seems to me to be the most balanced. In the United States, such women-led organizations as Code Pink, Mecca for Peace, Madre, Voices for Creative Non-Violence, and Womens’ International League for Peace and Freedom (which has just celebrated 100 years) are working for nuclear and weapons of mass destruction abolition, and for diplomacy over warfare.

As a general rule, women-led organizations have very little overhead. Let’s pause a moment to imagine just why that is!  But we have room to grow. Today, March 8, 2016, Friends of the Earth published a list of nine amazing women who have defended the environment, including the recently assassinated Honduran activist, Berta Caceres. Thousasnds of Hondurans came from afar, some taking 10-hour bus rides, to protest her murder. "Berta is not dead," they chanted. "She has multiplied." We must also bear in mind that a woman now running for president of the United States, made the overthrow of the legitimately elected Zelaya government possible during her stint as Secretary of State. Honduras now has more murders per capita than any other country in Central and South America.  None of these remarkable women acted alone. Individuals can do little without recognizing that change can be effected only when women organize. We still have a way to go if we are going to save life on this magnificent blue-green planet.

April 5th, 2016: Berkeley Honors Cecile Pineda