Today I thought it would be fun to juxtapose the looming architecture of San Francisco’s Financial District with an extraordinary building I visited in Berkeley.
Here is a sampling of banks, consumer palaces, office towers and other oppressively imposing structures.
The Microsoft Building
Even the reflections echoed the massiveness.
And here, in contrast, is the 10 year-old David Brower Center, a beautiful green building that is home to the environmental movement and its allies.
It was named in honor of David Brower, an extraordinary rock climber and pioneer of the environmental movement – he founded Friends of the Earth and later the League of Conservation Voters – who was the first executive director of the Sierra Club. Many different organizations share the space.
The lobby branches into the light-filled Hazel Wolf Gallery devoted to art of advocacy, which currently shows The National Geographic Photo Ark led by photographer Joel Sartore.
*
The Necessity team was there to interview two lawyers from the Climate Defense Project who represent climate activists and also work as legal observers during demonstrations and other actions. Executive director Kelsey Skaggs and co-founder Alice Cherry are both Harvard alumnae and the 2018 Echoing Green Fellows of Harvard’s Public Service Venture Funds (PSVF) which provides seed funding for emerging leaders who are tackling the world’s most pressing issues.
Kelsey SkaggsAlice Cherry
Among other things, the attorneys focus on the necessity defense, a legal argument used by people accused of acts of civil disobedience. It states that when all legal and political means are exhausted it might be necessary to engage in non-violent illegal action to prevent irreversible harm. You need to offer proof that harm was imminent, that the harm you inflicted does not exceed the harm that is potentially prevented, and you have to be able to show that all other attempts to stop the harm within our legal framework were futile.
Alice Cherry and Kelsey Skaggs in discussion with film director Jan Haaken
Here is a more knowledgeable and detailed description of the argument written by Kelsey Skaggs.
Given the threats that resource extraction entails for our climate, and the continuing inability to address industrial assaults on the environment within the usual frameworks of our law, this is the true vision, alluded to in today’s title.
Music today by John Prine, you can read about him here.
We should reframe the old adage “It takes a village to raise a child.” A more urgent summons is needed during a time when the 2019 UN Climate Change Summit failed to deliver and scientific predictions of how fast we are approaching a point of no return are growing more dire by the day.
How about: “It takes alliances to save a planet.”
Banners at the 9/25/2019 San Francisco Bay Area Strike for Climate Justice
There are those who deny the dangers (or the very existence) of the climate emergency, those who ignore it and those who are giving in to helpless passivity in the face of it.
Then there are those who are determined to raise awareness about the crisis, change, at a minimum, our behavior, or, more urgently, our whole system of relating to nature and each other. They are forging alliances across a whole spectrum of organizations and participants, setting aside differences in ideology and strategic approaches, and join forces to rescue this planet in whatever fashion is still possible. By necessity.
The documentary film project Necessityis in the process of following and interviewing several of the diverse groups and activists participating nationally in the fight for climate justice. (I am involved with the production photography of the series.)
Director Jan Haaken, Cinematographers Peter Menchini and Anna Rosa, Neshma Friend Camera Assist, and Sound Recordist Edmundo Torres, at 6 am walking to the meeting point.
This week we attended the Strike for Climate Justice! in San Francisco, called for by the Climate Justice SF Coalition, and organized by 350.org and Extinction Rebellion SF Bay. The attached website informs about the various alliances for the event; a look at the endorsements tells its own story of bridge building.
Endorsed by: 350.org, 350 Silicon Valley, Amazon Watch, Brasil Solidarity Network, Center for Biological Diversity, Code Pink, Democratic Socialists of America (San Francisco Chapter), Friends of the Earth, Global Exchange, Interfaith Climate Action Network, No Coal in Oakland, Rainforest Action Network, Sunflower Alliance, Sunrise Movement Bay Area and Sunrise Project.
The diversity of participants, apparent on paper, became so much more impressive when seen in action, people supporting each other during an event that was stunning in its dimensions. Here is a visual sampling, just to give you a sense of the range in age, politics, and approaches. Organizations and individuals alike were fully immersed in the proceedings, sharing a common goal.
Folks from XRSFBaySage Lighting Purification
Strongly represented were those protesting the Brazilian crimes against the rainforest.
Maria De Lime Dorsey from the Brazil Solidarity NetworkInterviewing Shahid Buttar, a San Francisco attorney who is launching a primary challenge to Nancy Pelosi Interview with one of the representatives of Idle No More SF Bay a group of Native Americans and their allies
*
Before the strike on Wednesday, activists stopped traffic for 3-5 minutes on several intersections in the financial district on Monday. They handed out leaflets informing the public about the planned actions. Drivers’ reactions ranged from smiles and thumbs up to frustrated honking and aggressive approaches to break the line closing the road. This kind of civil disobedience was tolerated by the police who were visibly present but did not engage.
Interview with Lisa Fithian, representing the National XRAnd the indispensable Heather from the local chapter.
*
Wednesday’s acts of peaceful civil disobedience directed against multinational banks who play a role in earth’s destruction, on the other hand, led to immediate arrests and/or citations. We cannot have people hindering Wells Fargo employees from entering their building after lunch by blocking the doorways….or have banners unrolled from the rooftops informing about the issues, can we? Paddy wagons were at the ready for the seven arrested, as were legal observers from the National Lawyers Guild to assist those who were in need. I will write about new approaches in defending acts of civil disobedience around climate justice with a necessity defense in more detail at a later point.
Police Helicopters circling Someone more agile and courageous than I, covering the roof action. Kelly Johnson is a remarkable photographer. You can see her footage here.
*
I cannot begin to imagine the amount of planning, preparation, organizing, sheer work and herding cats that must have gone into the choreography of what unfolded on the streets in the heart of the financial district on Market and Montgomery St. They all did a remarkable job, with veteran art organizer David Solnit being instrumental.
David Solnit, the North American Arts Organizer for 350.org
A lot of different art forms were utilized. They ranged from painting murals on the street – with tools, templates and colors all provided,
Final Stretch of Murals – Photos by Mary Spadaro
to clowns,
to music,
to dance,
to fun and games,
to an amazing silent mime group, The Red Rebel Brigade, who were stunning in their synchronized movement, emotive power – and tolerance of heat in those costumes on a late September day approaching temperatures in the 90s.
*
The theatrics were matched by the passion of many of the individual signs carried in one fashion or another by individuals.
*
The festive atmosphere of a block party on steroids helped instill a sense of solidarity and community. It raised the hope that there will be enough momentum to wake up the numbers of people needed to create the mass movement necessary to hit the brakes on our ruination of the planet. Organizing it must have been hard. The harder work lies still in front of us. A necessity, if we want to preserve a future for our children and grandchildren. Knowing we are doing it for them, and are not alone in this struggle, will ease the way.
Today is the start day of the Global Climate Strike week. We don’t know how big it is going to be, but my prediction is: massive! Here are some known statistics:
Globally, 72 trade unions and federations are supporting the climate strike, with unions in Quebec and Italy taking formal strike action to join the youth school strikers. In the U.S., workers in major tech companies like Amazon, Facebook, and Microsoft are walking out of work to demand their companies take real action on climate change.
6,300 websites, including Kickstarter, Tumblr, and Tor will be green-screening their sites and directing visitors to the climate strike website as part of the Digital Climate Strike.
Globally, over 2,500 businesses are supporting the strikes —from those going all out, like Patagonia and Lush, with poster-making areas in their stores or closing their doors for the day completely, to others allowing workers to walk out for a short period to join the strike.
In the United States, a monumental mobilisation will see over 1,000 protests across the country, taking #StrikeWithUs outside of the major cities to every corner of the nation. New York public schools have given permission for all 1.1 million students to skip classes! More than 1,240 actions will be held in Europe across seven countries. There will be mobilisations in every country in Latin America, including countries that have not participated in climate action before such as Cuba and Venezuela! From Brazilright up to Mexico, there will be protests: A massive march in the south of Brazil against the proposal of the biggest coal mine in the country.
Here are some pictures of what this Friday so far looked around the world.
In Berlin 230.000 are in the streets, below that is Hamburg. Performance artists stand on ice blocks to demonstrate the world’s potential fate.
Here is the FridaysforFuture Map that shows events near you. For us in PDX, the demonstrations begin at City Hall in the morning and will then march over the Hawthorne bridge down to OMSI where there will be events all afternoon until 5 PM – Meet me there! You will join scientists, artists, and, of course, the youths who are leading the way.
I will also be involved with documenting some climate change actions in CA, part of next week. Expect some interesting postings, even if irregularly sent.
Photographs today from threatening skies, hung over us all week when they weren’t already pouring down….
If the photographs of ospreys seem unconnected – well, they are mostly captured in flight and I will be flying too, reading Kendi en route to the East Coast. Ibram X. Kendi is Professor of History and International Relations and the Founding Director of the Antiracist Research and Policy Center at American University in Washington, DC. His newest book just came out: How to Be an Antiracist. His previous book, STAMPED FROM THE BEGINNING: THE DEFINITIVE HISTORY OF RACIST IDEAS IN AMERICA, won the 2016 National Book Award for Nonfiction.
It will be the usual, then, the occasional Art on the Road report, but no regular posts until I return from my travels. And speaking of which: here is a proposal by the German Green Party to ban domestic flights by the year 2035. In a country the size of Germany that is conceivable, if trains pick up the slack. Not so much here, when you consider what it would take to visit anywhere in the country….
In any case – I’m off. Just think: you’re getting a break!
Music offers a couple of selections for Labor Day!
On my way home in the car from a terrific but exhausting weekend at Maryhill Museum (more on that to come later this week) I heard an interview with Christine Lagarde, leader of the IMF until recently.
When asked about what had possibly confounded her in all her years in leadership positions, she answered, “A study that showed that 90% of the 189 membership countries of the International Monetary Fund had legal and/or constitutional restrictions, discriminating against women.”
Here is more on that. We are talking about issues concerning inheritance, or custody of children, or being allowed to own businesses. Some countries forbid women from doing specific jobs, 59 countries have no laws against sexual harassment in the workplace and there are 18 countries where women can be legally prevented from working. And this is only a partial list!
My work is loving the world. Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird – equal seekers of sweetness. Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums. Here the clam deep in the speckled sand.
Are my boots old? Is my coat torn? Am I no longer young and still not half-perfect? Let me keep my mind on what matters, which is my work,
which is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished. The phoebe, the delphinium. The sheep in the pasture, and the pasture. Which is mostly rejoicing, since all ingredients are here,
Which is gratitude, to be given a mind and a heart and these body-clothes, a mouth with which to give shouts of joy to the moth and the wren, to the sleepy dug-up clam, telling them all, over and over, how it is that we live forever.
This is the first poem in Mary Oliver‘s collection Thirst, titled, “The Messenger.
I encountered it at a writing workshop for houseless vendors at StreetRoots this week. Mary Oliver had been previously introduced to me by the workshop leader who continually excels in expanding my horizons and I took to this poem in no time. Hey, gratitude for nature! Up my alley. Loving the world? A familiar task. Mouth shouting joy – my readers are my witness!
And then a participant pointed out, with anguish bordering on rage, that it was not their job to love the world. A world that mistreated them, rejected them, punished them, tortured them, deprived them and excluded them. A world where safety was non-existent, food unreliable, pain untreated. Where admiration of nature was not exactly high on the list when you could but fear the elements. Where the very idea of living forever is blacked out by the worry about living for another day.
You know that feeling when heat creeps up your neck, into your cheeks, the blushing that interferes with breathing? That was me: caught in my bubble of middle-class existence, originally not even tangentially aware how gratitude of the kind the poet references is linked to privilege. The privilege to have time to notice, room to appreciate, means to express and capacity to love nature within my safe surroundings.
I am not saying that homelessness precludes gratitude. On the contrary, I am often floored when seeing the generosity of spirit expressed by the folks I’ve gotten to know. I am more concerned with the demand characteristic or the taking for granted in my own head that the world is to be loved.
Mary Oliver’s work might have been to love the world. (She died this January – a remembrance from the New Yorker is in the link.) My work right now is to become more aware of how automatically we apply standards that seem self-evident to us – gratitude for nature! – but which are wholly inappropriate for those whose very existence is under attack. And then my work is to fight the causes for the differences in standard. Actually: the work of all of us. 38.000 houseless people in our city deserve that.
Photographs today are from another habitable building making room for another luxury hotel in downtown Portland.
Music today is from an interesting cross-over album Now and Then Music from the Great Depression(s) 2010/1929 ( to which we might add 2020, I gather.)
Someone else’s words, again, for your weekend reading. Written by Rebecca Solnit in April, I wish the essay had more circulation.
I value Solnit as a feminist thinker and writer; usually her pieces, which she seems to churn out by the minute, are tightly structured and argued with heady measure. This one seems like passion took over and the language erupts, at times almost like stream of thought. An interesting experience.
I’ll be back with more reports from the Exquisite Gorge project on Monday!
Music to day by another strong woman, Louise Farrenc (1804- 1875) Following her marriage, she interrupted her studies to play concerts with her husband, the flautist Aristide Farrenc. Despite her brilliance as a performer and composer, she was paid less than her male counterparts for nearly a decade. Only after the triumphant premiere of her Nonet for wind and strings – in which the violinist Joseph Joachim took part -did she demand and receive equal pay.
Photographs are from Portland State University’s Walk of the Heroineshonoring women.
Let’s face it: I am on overload. There are 4 more artists to interview and write about before the grand finale of the Exquisite Gorge project in 2 weeks. No matter how much I enjoy the project – and I do, it has been intellectually satisfying beyond my expectations – these pieces are long and require a lot of informational reading on my part, as you might have guessed if you followed the accumulation.
So I am copping out just a little bit: depending on where I am in the process I will let others speak for YDP.
Today, then, I leave you to words that are magical, in more than one sense of the word, and deeply moving. Obviously not my words. One of the most powerful pieces of writing I’ve come across in a long time.
One of the sources of racism as well as one of the consequences of racism is segregation between the races. Segregation has served a purpose to keep the races apart (and I will not even start to lay out the reasons why that was advantageous to one of the races under discussion.) It has in some domaines been institutionalized de jure by the administration and nowhere is that more visible than when you look at Housing Acts.
The Color of Law, a book by Richard Rothstein, a former columnist for the New York Times and a research associate at the Economic Policy Institute, as well as a Fellow at the Thurgood Marshall Institute of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, documents the evidence that government not merely ignored discriminatory practices in the residential sphere, but promoted them. Here is a strong voice, telling us about racism in politics.
If you have an hour, listen to the conversation between Rothstein and Ta-Nehisi Coats on the topic. Time well spent.
Otherwise, here are the highlights of the argument (basically borrowed from here. )
Already existing housing segregation inherent to the New Deal’s housing projects were made worse by a 1934 Federal Government policy called redlining (the term comes from the colors used to map out where racial divisions ran in any given area – red for Blacks.) It concerned a refusal to insure mortgages in or near African-American neighborhoods. The FHA was also subsidizing builders who were mass-producing entire subdivisions for whites — with the requirement that none of the homes be sold to African-Americans. The rationale? If African-Americans would buy property in white areas, property value would sink and thus loans would be at risk.
The FHA actually had an Underwriting Manual which explicitly said: “Incompatible racial groups should not be permitted to live in the same communities.” It recommended that walls should be built to divide neighborhoods, that highways or rivers would be a good way for separating them. Many neighborhoods legally prevented anyone but a white person to acquire property.
The wealth differential between white Americans and African-American – the latter own about 5% of what the former own – can be economically traced back to the equity in homes that was available for the former and not the latter. This was implicitly acknowledged in the Fair Housing Act that was finally passed in 1968, now giving the right to African-Americans to buy property in any neighborhood they wished. One small problem: none of the housing in the neighborhoods they were always excluded from was within financial reach at this point, with housing prices in those neighborhoods going through the roof.
All this is in my head because of the news that Raj Chetty, an economist in Seattle, believes there is a way to improve the situation. Here is an experiment by his research group, together with the Seattle Housing Authority and the King County Housing Authority. Noting that people who received housing assistance (Section 8 vouchers, essentially a rent subsidy) stayed in their usual neighborhood instead of seeking housing in neighborhoods with more opportunities, particularly for their children with good schools etc. they offered the following:
“A random subset of people receiving vouchers for the first time would get more than just the rental subsidy. They would also be given information on which neighborhoods promise the most opportunity for their kids, based on the research data. They’d also be assigned “navigators” whose job it was to walk them through the apartment application process, and receive additional financial assistance with down payments if necessary. “
A year later: the additional support raised the share of families moving to high-opportunity neighborhoods from 14 percent to 54 percent.
Let’s be clear: this is a large effect, and it means potentially a better life for those random families who were assigned this role in the experiment. It is, however, NOT dealing with the systemic issues underlying the decay of poor neighborhoods and the exponential improvement in wealthier ones. Until we are willing to deal with the economics (and politics) of segregation, social science interventions will be just a drop in the bucket. But knowing that some seem to work is a good start.
Photographs today are from Seattle, where the intervention took place.
