Environmental soapbox time

Environmental soapbox time: Tonight I saw a showing of Black Wave, a documentary on the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill and its aftermath. If you guys recall, when I was up here last summer the case finally was concluded in the Supreme Court.  The final settlement could not POSSIBLY do right to all who were affected by the spill. Even now, almost twenty years later, there are places in Prince William Sound where if you dig 6 inches into the sediment, you can find oil residue. The pink salmon fishery there was closed for 2 or 3 years after the spill (because the salmon didn't COME), and the herring fishery completely collapsed. Besides environmental effects, there are all these workers who were employed to clean up the oil who now have all kinds of health problems because of PAHs they inhaled from the oil. These are carcinogens.

It was pretty damn depressing.  The legistlative system, which is supposed to be protecting our rights, pretty much failed all these people, because Exxon is such a huge company that it was able to spend millions of dollars on legal fees to extend court proceedings and to appeal and reappeal...

However, what I found really interesting about all this is what is coming out/growing from the result of this movie. Riki Ott, a toxicologist/political activist who has lived in Cordova and written books on the spill was here at the movie screening for Q&A.  She has been touring with her books and this movie since October, and given the timeframe of all this - Obama being elected, the economic collapse, frustrations with corporate greed/deceit, the growing awareness that we really need to get off oil dependency (the environmental/health problems discussed in Black Wave just add more good reasons to do so), she's found that people are extremely receptive to DOING something about this. And so this movement has started, to create a constitutional amendment stripping large corporations of their ability to be treated in court equal to a person. I haven't looked too much into this but at the moment, what is most exciting is the idea that I could be around for yet another historical event. Winds of change people, winds of change.

I have to admit, given all that is going on lately - increases of natural disasters, growing global conciousness, collapsing economy, mobilization of people....Maybe the Mayans had it right.