Notes from a radical

I've worked at ForestEthics, a half-Canadian organization, for more than a third of my life — before marriage, before children, before so much of who I've become. In the pie chart of my brain, a good slice is occupied by ForestEthics, sometimes more than I'd care to admit.

These days, that makes me a radical. At least in the eyes of the Canadian government, which, over the past few weeks, has issued some very ominous threats against groups like ForestEthics that work to protect the environment, especially when our work involves stopping Big Oil.

Two weeks ago, the Canadian Minster of Natural Resources called us, along with our allies, ‘radicals’ that seek to ‘hijack the [Canadian] regulatory system to achieve [our] radical ideological agenda.’ He went on to say that “there may be a need for legislation” that many believe could shut down voices like ours. While the government claims its issue with ForestEthics is that we use U.S. (meaning foreign) funding to affect Canadian policy, something much more troubling is going on.

We've been poking a stick at Big Oil, and big oil is biting back. As I write that, I know it sounds crazy, but all my years of challenging industries like forestry and paper pale in comparison to taking on oil. There are just so many more zeros in the money involved, and the response to threatening those zeroes is exponentially more vicious.

Right before the holidays, ForestEthics got Chiquita bananas to commit to stop using fuel from Canada's toxic Tar Sands to ship its bananas. It was I think the 15th company we'd gotten to publicly say they'd move away from using the dirtiest fuel on earth. Leaders of the Canadian government responded by saying they'd boycott Chiquita. And we got crazy crazy messages on our facebook page about how Canadians didn't cause 9/11 so why didn't we go after the people who did. Or did we support them? Outrageous.

Printing shirts for our Chiquita campaign by the light of the summer solstice moon on Galiano Island.

My oily Warhol-inspired banana.

Meanwhile as the government has a field day batting around relatively small fries like us, it actively solicits billions of dollars of foreign investment in the Tar Sands, mostly from multi-national corporations.

This is why Stella and I would be at an Occupy protest tonight if there were anyone but buffalo to affect out here in Montana.

Away from the warm and constant beat of San Francisco's activist heart, I feel a little lonely. Cornell West's post-Occupy speech at Berkeley, which I streamed online last night, lifted me up as I chased down midnight, still working away.