Rainforest Action Network had this
movie about the tragic story of the falling rainforests of Indonesia,
felled so we can buy palm oil from plantations that replace them. They
organized showings all over. I volunteered to be part of that. They
mailed me a packet including a DVD and some information. I invited a
bunch of friends to come over and see it with me.
The GREEN movie featured an orangutan who has given up on life. The
reasons become obvious as the movie continues. No trees to climb. No
food to forage for. The beautiful homeland replaced by a grid of palm
oil plantations. Security guards to keep the animals from plundering
the cash crops. Nowhere else to go. This was followed by garish clips
of advertising images showing products made with palm oil. Cheerios,
cosmetics, McDonalds French fries, and even biodiesel. At the end of
the movie they put the dead ape in a body bag. I felt like an
accomplice in the death.
This was followed by another movie that featured a lot of interviews
with indigenous tribes people who had been pushed off the land by
Presidential Decree. They had watched their rainforest torn down and
replaced with a palm oil plantation. Soldiers had prevented them from
doing anything about it. One of them said "if one of us had cut down
the mother tree, he would have owed the tribe 600 loin cloths." The
government had only given them 60 for clear cutting much more than the
one tree. They wonder "what will become of our children? Once the money
they gave us is gone we have nothing. When we had the forest to pass
along, the future and past were one. Now the cycle is broken." The look
they gave was angry, frustrated, baffled, and painful. I imagine that's
something like what happened in Illinois about 180 years ago, except
back then they didn't have the impersonal nature of the exploitation so
thoroughly figured out yet.
At the end of the event we had a brief
ceremony to mark the new Green Party of Santa Clara County Council.
Left to right that's Andrea Dorey, Tian Harter (this photo-blog's
author), and Merriam Kathleen.
After a while the group boiled down to some core Greens that wanted to
talk. Somebody brought up the question "what's the strategy for dealing
with 14?" I said we should go for the "one dollar one vote"
marketplace. I told them about the time a geezer Republican was trying
to make me join his party while I was tabling against 14. I told him
that the most unsubsidized farmers in our food system are the ones that
vend at the farmers market. They deal in greenbacks and coin mostly.
I also told them about the time I was listening to the radio and some
guy said something like "the cash system is slightly less prone to
bubbles than the financial system."
I didn't get into my feeling that giving a homeless a state quarter
while saying "Have Arizona" if that's what the art on the coin
represents is my idea of local government action. That's the kind of
situation where "being the government" is cheap and okay. Giving about
the same thing to a musician is more like investing in the community's
spiritual life though.
Probably the most memorable story I heard was Andrea's retelling of her
20 plus year war against developers and the County to keep the native
ecosystem of her two acres pristine. I'm proud to be on the County
Council with such a citizen.