100 Slaves 100 Enemies

What’s holding us back is the last century of intense efforts to atomize people, to drive them towards the superficial things in life, like consumption. You have to fabricate consumers. You have to make people hate governments.

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Go back to the days when organizations and movements had to be built from scratch. There’s never some shining leader who comes along and says, “I’m going to lead you out of the woods.” These things are built up by consciousness-raising groups.

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I think small actions here and there and elsewhere are fine, but they have to coalesce.

Take the antiwar movement again. When I got started giving talks in the early 1960s, I was talking to small groups of people in somebody’s living room or maybe a church basement. Or we’d have to set up a meeting at the university with 20 different issues just to get people out to hear about the Vietnam War.

This is one thing they don’t teach you in school or write about in the papers; it’s too dangerous. People aren’t supposed to know what they can achieve, working together.

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The hard part is always going from understanding among individuals and small groups to integration and focused action. That takes effort and commitment. It doesn’t happen by itself; there are no manuals.

Kick-starting the environmental movement: An interview with Noam Chomsky | Briarpatch Magazine – Fiercely independent (& often irreverent) news & views..

found via The Comsky Archive – comsky.info

While it may be the U.S. metro in the worst environmental shape, Atlanta isn’t the only place whose residents contend with contamination. Top spots for toxicity are distributed throughout the country, with Detroit, Houston, Chicago, Philadelphia, Cleveland and Los Angeles right behind it.

via America’s Most Toxic Cities – Forbes.com.

The damage to the environment by human households is minuscule next to the damage done by corporations. Municipalities and individuals use 10 percent of the nation’s water while the other 90 percent is consumed by agriculture and industry. Individual consumption of energy accounts for about a quarter of all energy consumption; the other 75 percent is consumed by corporations. Municipal waste accounts for only 3 percent of total waste production in the United States. We can, and should, live more simply, but it will not be enough if we do not radically transform the economic structure of the industrial world.

via Truthdig – Reports – A Reality Check from the Brink of Extinction.

I sure am glad that I’m a vegetarian. And I’m really pissed that all the fish in our country have mercury in them.

I’m so pissed about this that I barely noticed that the highest mercury levels in fish occur in Republican strongholds. I wonder if it’s because Republicans don’t typically support protecting the environment. Or maybe it’s God’s way of communicating to his constituents.

To quote one of my fellow outraged Americans:

One day, God’s gonna stand before you, and he’s gonna judge you and the rest of your damn cronies up on the Hill — and the rest of your damn cronies up on the hill — and then you can get your just desserts.

Mmmmm… dessert.

From Federal study shows mercury in fish widespread:

Some of the highest levels in fish were detected in the remote blackwater streams along the coasts of the Carolinas, Georgia, Florida and Louisiana, where bacteria in surrounding forests and wetlands help in the conversion. The second-highest concentration of mercury was detected in largemouth bass from the North Fork of the Edisto River near Fairview Crossroads, S.C.

“Unfortunately, it’s the case that almost any fish you test will have mercury now,” said Andrew Rypel, a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Mississippi who has studied mercury contamination in fish throughout the Southeast. He said other research has shown mercury in fish from isolated areas of Alaska and Canada, and species that live in the deep ocean.

Sleep tight.

The vast oxygen-starved dead zone in the northern Gulf of Mexico shrunk by more than half its typical size this year, but scientists see nothing to celebrate.

The dead zone — an area so low in oxygen that it hosts almost no life — still spanned 3,000 square miles when measurements were taken last week.

more: Pollution Still Feeding Gulf Dead Zone | CommonDreams.org.

When I first heard that there was a giant blob of goo floating off the coast of Alaska, I assumed it was Sarah Palin. But, in fact, no one knows what it is. Huffington Post has video, which doesn’t provide much information yet has an eerie cinematic quality that I assume someone will steal and use for an interesting opening shot.