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The week that was

24 Apr

This week I:

- saw a banana slug on my way to class – the first one I’ve seen since I’ve been able to call the banana slug my school mascot!

- made a loaf of rye buttermilk bread from this newly released cookbook.  Yum!

- took advantage of an office-mate’s recommendation to back up my computer with Carbonite.  Besides backing up your files, it also lets you access everything on your computer anywhere you have an internet connection. Awesome!

- after two and a half years of revisions, submitted an article based on my master’s research findings to its first academic journal.  I felt proud and productive for about 45 minutes, and then fell into a sad, empty kind of state.  My writer and researcher friends tell me this is common.  : (

- guided my students into the murky waters of writing a literature review. So far so good.

- had some of my photos published as an accompaniment to an article on the recent agreement to allow California industries to offset their pollution by purchasing pollution credits in Chiapas, Mexico and Acre, Brazil. Check out the backstory in my post.

- read the following in preparation for the Supreme Court case on climate change that was heard on Tuesday. (Now I need to find out what the actual verdict was, and how it impacts the case in Alaska I described in a recent post)

- got a phone call from the post office saying that my new bees had arrived in the mail!  They are now settled safely into their new diggs, and being, well, busy little bees.

- indulged my fantasy of being a scholar-farmer by doing some grading at 5th Crow Farm.  The fantasy part, however, doesn’t involve my car smelling like PSG after lending a hand with errands (that’s Peruvian Seagull Guano for those of you not in the know). It also doesn’t involve the earth trying to eat my shoes as I navigate the mud in my “stylish and inappropriate” footwear of choice: clogs.

- realized, again, that nothing makes me feel incompetent faster than trying to hang out with farmers while they are working.

Bees at the post office – in the box they were shipped in

What do people from California have in common with people from Chiapas?

21 Apr

What do people from California have in common with people from Chiapas?  Read Jeff Conant’s latest article on AlterNet today to find out!  Be sure to check out the slideshow that accompanies it too – it includes some of my photos from the San Joaquin Valley.  Some of them have already been published elsewhere and some are new (like the one below).  All were chosen by the author to help readers visualize some of the toxicity problems in the San Joaquin Valley so they might better understand why some Valley residents participated in the recent lawsuit against California’s Global Warming Solutions Act.  See my other post on this topic here.

Jeff used to be my boss at the Hesperian Foundation when we worked on this book together (Spanish translation coming soon!).  He came to Hesperian after getting booted out of Mexico for, as I understand it, the crime of volunteering on small scale water distribution systems in Zapatista communities in Chiapas.  I left Hesperian to get a master’s degree at UC Davis, where I researched the Central Valley environmental justice movement.  Through the twists and turns of current events, our working lives have crossed paths again, this time through concerns about how a policy designed to slow climate change might negatively impact poor people in both California and Chiapas.

In our past life together, Jeff’s job was to write a book and mine was to get it illustrated, so providing photos for his article this week was a fun twist on an old theme.

power lines

What does the tobacco industry have in common with greenhouse gas polluters?

8 Apr

What does the tobacco industry have in common with greenhouse gas polluters? According to lawyer Brent Newell, the answer is conspiracy.  Newell is one of the lawyers involved in the case of Native Village of Kivalina and City of Kivalina vs. ExxonMobile Corporation, et al.  The “et al” part of this case is no small thing: the village is suing ExxonMobile and the other 23 largest greenhouse gas polluters in the country over their contributions to climate change, which they claim is damaging the village’s property and way of life.

During a talk and reception at my university earlier this week, Newell gave us an overview of the case.  One thing that caught my attention was the case’s unexpected link to the tobacco industry.  Newell’s legal team at the Center on Race, Poverty and the Environment has teamed up with private sector lawyers experienced in the tobacco wars, who won their charge that the tobacco industry had conspired to prevent the public from knowing about the risks of smoking.  One of the legal strategies in the Kivalina case draws on that example by claiming that the top 24 greenhouse gas polluters in the country have conspired to mislead the public about climate change.  Yikes!

The case was dismissed and is now awaiting a hearing in the 9th circuit court of appeals.  The judge has delayed hearing the case until the outcome of a similar case (Connecticut vs. American Electric Power) is heard by the Supreme Court on April 19th. The American Electric Power case does not contain a charge of conspiracy.  What the cases have in common is a claim that greenhouse gas polluters are a public nuisance that damages the property of others.

Stay tuned!

Find out more: For some of the legal documents from the case, including the original complaint and its dismissal, see the Climate Justice page from the Center on Race, Poverty and the Environment’s website.

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