War and Peace
Sea Shepherd ship Steve Irwin
I was going over the issues I’ve been following this last year, checking to see what progress, if any, we have made. The Sea Shepherd is out there again, keeping the illegal Japanese whaling boats away from the protected whales in the Australian Antarctic Territory. Animal Planet is onboard filming this year.
The Svalbard Global Seed Vault has opened. Seeds from all over the world have been placed in three caverns carved into the permafrost on an island just 500 miles from the North Pole for safekeeping. Norway has provided the funding for the project and developed it in collaboration with the Global Crop Diversity Trust.
The activists with the Buffalo Field Campaign are still in the field - in 20 below zero temperatures - out everyday on skis keeping watch over the last remaining herd of wild bison in this country.
In March of this year, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced approximately 3.9 million acres of federal old-growth forest will remain protected as murrelet habitat “This reversal, coupled with a recent court decision throwing out a timber industry attempt to take the murrelet off the endangered species list, should end the timber industry’s profit-driven and illegal attack on the coastal forests that murrelets need to survive,” said Kristen Boyles, an attorney with Earthjustice.
And the California Supreme Court threw out a plan that had given protection of endangered species to a logging company, Pacific Lumber Co. who finally sold out to Humboldt Redwood Co. (HRC). The management of HRC met with the dedicated activists who have put their lives on the line for years and assured them that old growth groves on HRC land will be permanently protected. This video from North Coast EarthFirst! shows what was involved in protecting these trees, this habitat and the marbled murrelet.
The Wild Sky Wilderness bill protecting a 106,000-acre Wilderness in the heart of the Mount Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest in the Cascade Mountains of Washington state passed the U.S. Senate with both Democratic and Republican Senators giving unanimous approval much to my heart’s delight and I’m sure the delight of the black bears, bald eagles, mountain goats, wolverines, cougars and spotted owls who live there.
The devastation wrought by Hurricane Ike continues to remain unresolved on the Texas Gulf Coast. They are still trying to figure out how to get rid of the debris and many people are still waiting for FEMA trailers. Those living in tents faced snowfall last week! The number of residents has declined from 57,000 to about 40,000 and there has been a 30 percent reduction in school enrollment. Another community devastated as we move on to the next crisis.
I try to give this some perspective by drawing the lines between what my grandmother told me about the hurricane of 1900 in Galveston and what is happening now, between what my great grandmother said the first time she saw a car and how the wisdom of her comments is coming back around.
I think about the craziness out there - Israel and the Palestinians, Pakistan and India, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan - and I know that there are ordinary people there, like many of us here, who just want the violence to stop.
And I consider this - the Internet was originally developed for use by the US military and now it is the greatest tool we have to transform the energy of conflict and domination into one of peace and justice.