Magnitude 5.9 Earthquake Hits Virginia

You don't suppose fracking and mountaintop mining played a role in the earthquake...do you? Hmm, humans having a negative impact on the environment? Nah, couldn't be...that's just crazy talk. And climate change is a hoax.

(keep it up assholes)

Big Think Interview with Richard Dawkins - 10/21/2009

Richard Dawkins: Yes. I'm Richard Dawkins, former Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University, author of The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker, The God Delusion and The Greatest Show on Earth, among others.
Question: How would you correct the understanding that evolution is a theory?
Richard Dawkins: The word “theory” can be used to mean something speculative and tentative. In everyday speech it probably usually is used in that sense. Scientists very often use it in a much more positive sense. I think the easiest way is to use the ordinary language word “fact”. In the ordinary language sense of the word fact, evolution is a fact.
Question: What is the evidence that evolution is a fact?
Richard Dawkins: The evidence that makes it a fact is partly fossil evidence, partly comparative evidence, looking at modern species and comparing their bones, their organs, their structures generally, and especially their molecules, their genes, at a molecular level. This is extremely persuasive and powerful evidence. You compare the genes of animals and plants. You find that the pattern of resemblance is a tree, a branching tree. And that branching tree could only be a family tree. Other very persuasive evidence is the geographical distribution of animals and plants on islands and continents: they're exactly where we should expect them to be if evolution were a fact.
Question: What is the central tenet of your book, The Selfish Gene?
Richard Dawkins: Natural selection chooses among self-replicating entities. Those self-replicating entities have some kind of power over their probability of being copied, of being replicated, of being passed on. In practice that almost always means choosing between alternative DNA genes. So it's about the natural selection, the disproportionate -- it's about the unequal survival of genes through generations. That is natural selection. We see it in the form of changes of phenotypes; that's to say changes in bodies, because it's through the changes in the bodies that the genes induce, that they insure their survival or fail to survive. The ones that are good at surviving are the ones that are good at building bodies that are good at surviving and reproducing.

Question: What does it mean that we’re gene machines?
Richard Dawkins: We’re gene machines in the sense that a body is constructed by genes that have been successful in surviving in the past; they're good at surviving because they're good at constructing machines in which they survive. So a body is a machine for the propagation of the genes that built it.
Question: What are some of the remaining mysteries of evolution?
Richard Dawkins: One important active area is the origin of sex and why we have sex at all. It's controversial and interesting and unsolved. Another one I think would be the evolution of consciousness, especially human consciousness. Another one would be the embryological roots by which genes influence bodies.
Question: What is the main mystery of sex?
Richard Dawkins: Well, the mystery there is that, on the view the selfish gene, every animal is trying to maximize the number of genes that it passes on. And so mixing half your genes with those of a sexual partner seems like an odd thing to do, and on the face of it it's throwing away half your genes with every child you have. So it needs an explanation, and various explanations have been suggested.
Question: What is the most popular explanation for the act?
Richard Dawkins: I supposed the most fashionable one now is the one that's associated with the name of W. D. Hamilton, my former Oxford colleague. He took the view that parasites are the most important selection pressure bearing on creatures, and that parasites, because they are -- especially bacteria -- evolving so incredibly rapidly, the genes that any one individual needs in order to survive in the present generation of parasites may not be the genes that are needed in future generations. So there needs to be an extremely rapid turnover, extremely rapid changing, of gene pools. And sex may be -- well, sex certainly will do that. And the only question is whether the pressure from parasites is sufficiently great to compensate the so-called twofold cost of sex, the fact that sexual reproduction does throw away half the genes in each generation.
Question: Why can’t we understand the basis of consciousness?
Richard Dawkins: Well, both what it is -- it clearly has something to do with brains, and it's something that emerges from brains. When brains get sufficiently big, presumably, as human brains have, consciousness seems to emerge. As to what it is, that's a philosophically very difficult question, which biologists are no more equipped to deal with than anybody else.
Question: Is there a certain brain capacity necessary for the development of consciousness?
Richard Dawkins: Oh, nobody knows, because we don't know which animals are conscious. We don't actually, technically, even know that any other human being is conscious. We just each of us know that we ourselves are conscious. We infer on pretty good grounds that other people are conscious, and it's the same sort of grounds that lead us to infer that probably chimpanzees are conscious and probably dogs are conscious. But when we come to something like earthworms and snails, it's anybody's guess.
Question: How can science have a unique insight into cognizance?
Richard Dawkins: Well, that's a very difficult question since we can't actually measure whether creatures are conscious. So I guess science has as much insight as any other subject, but I don't think I can answer that question directly. Maybe computer science has as much insight into it as any other science.
Question: When did you first realize you were an atheist?
Richard Dawkins: I think first the realization that there are lots of different religions, and they can't all be right. And the Christian one in which I was brought up was clearly only one of many. But that didn't finally make me into an atheist. What finally made me into an atheist was the realization that there was no scientific reason to believe in any sort of supernatural creator. And that came with the understanding of Darwinian evolution.
Question: Do scientists ever need faith?
Richard Dawkins: Not in the sense of faith as meaning belief in something for which there is no evidence. There are various senses of faith in which we do -- scientists do participate. There's branches of science which I don't understand; for example, physics. It could be said, I suppose, that I have faith that physicists understand it better than I do. And so when I say something that physicists tell me, such as that there was nothing before the big bang -- they're not allowed to talk about the word "before" in the context of the big bang -- I sort of have faith that physicists understand enough to be allowed to say that, even though I don't understand why they're allowed to say that. But it's not blind faith; it's not faith in the absence of evidence. It's faith that's based upon confidence in the scientific method, in the scientific peer review process, the fact that I know that there are other physicists who can test, verify, criticize the views of any one physicist. So it's not the same as religious faith, which is based upon no evidence at all.
Question: Why do so many people on earth have religious faith?
Richard Dawkins: Well, it's certainly true that so many people do have religious faith, not just individual people. Not all individual people do, but all cultures -- I think I'm right in saying that all peoples -- in the plural -- have had faith, religious faith of some kind. They believe in some kind of supernatural gods or goddesses or leprechauns or whatever it might be. Why do they have it? Well, I think it's very tempting -- when you don't really understand what's going on, when you're ignorant of the world, when you find yourself surrounded by a wonderful world, a puzzling world, a mysterious world, a frightening world -- it must be quite tempting to put your faith into a supernatural being of some kind. 
Question: Did you know that you were going to be a scientist from a young age?
Richard Dawkins: No, I didn't know I was going to be a scientist from a young age. I suppose I was interested in science. I can remember at the age of about six being fascinated by the planets and learning all about Mars and Venus and things. I wasn't much of a biologist as a child. My father had been and gave me all the right influences, and my mother too. I went into the biological stream at school, pretty much drifted in. I suppose it was about my best subject, but it wasn't an obsession with me like it is with many birdwatchers and bug hunters, people like that.
Question: When did you decide you would devote your life to science?
Richard Dawkins: I never really decided that until I was at Oxford, at the age of about twenty, I suppose. So it wasn't at school. At school I kind of drifted into the biology sixth form, and then I knew I was always going to try to get into Oxford. And I did get into Oxford to read zoology, but I didn't really become fired up and realize that this is how I want to spend my life until about my second year at Oxford; I must have been about 19.
Question: What was your first scientific discovery?
Richard Dawkins: My doctorate, my D.Phil. at Oxford, was about decision-making in animals. And I happened to work with baby chicks, but it could have been anything. And I suppose my first discovery was of a mechanism that plausibly could be going on inside the head of a chick or any other animal when making a choice between two alternatives. It was not a piece of neurological research, which it might well have been. I mean, one could have been looking at cells in the brain and looking for mechanisms of decision-making there. But my method was more the black box method, where you don't open up the animal at all; you watch its behavior and you develop theoretical models, deduce mathematically predictions from your theoretical models, and then test those predictions against the facts -- do experiments to see whether they're true. And that's a sort of classic scientific method, the black box technique. And I used that and really rather successfully. I developed a model, used some simple algebra to deduce predictions from the model, and then did experiments which extremely accurately fulfilled those predictions.
Question: What is your favorite research project you’ve done?
Richard Dawkins: Well, my original doctoral research -- oh no, I'll talk about something else. With my first wife, Dr. Marian Stamp Dawkins, we worked on what it means to say that an animal has made a decision. If you watch the muscular movements of an animal -- we were working again on chicks, particularly drinking behavior in chicks. When a chick -- indeed, when any bird, pretty much -- drinks, it puts its bill into the water, and then it kind of scoops the water up in the bill in a rather graceful curve, and then the water kind of trickles down the gullet. And that's a very stereotyped movement. We filmed it; we filmed chicks doing this. And then we analyzed the movement frame by frame. Our definition of a decision was based upon the idea that decisions occur at the beginning of fixed action patterns, which are sequences of movements which are very stereotyped and which don't vary.
So something like that drinking movement -- down into the water and then curve up -- is a fixed action pattern. Once it starts, we conjectured, it won't stop. So a decision is the beginning of a fixed action pattern, which determines the next however many it is frames of film on our frame-by-frame analysis. So if you looked at the frames of film, you could actually measure -- and we did this -- the predictability of each frame as a function of the preceding frames. We plotted a graph of the predictability measured in information theory, measured in bits of information -- the predictability of each frame as a function of the preceding frames. And we found that when the chick began a fixed action pattern such as drinking, the predictability shot up and stayed up during the duration of the fixed action pattern. And then it shot down again, and the behavior became unpredictable; you couldn't tell what was going to happen next for a while, until it entered another fixed action pattern, when the predictability again shot up. This was a quantitative measure -- obviously, drinking itself is not of great interest -- but what is of interest is that you can quantitatively measure and express what you mean by a decision in a continuous stream of animal behavior.
Question: Have you ever started any projects that were did not complete?
Richard Dawkins: Yes. I have begun several projects which were never completed, not necessarily because they failed, but because I got interested in other things. And some of them were looking quite promising. For example, I began a project on the song of crickets; this was when I was still working in a department of animal behavior. Crickets sing by vibrating their wings against each other, and different species of crickets have a different pattern of song, which they control by the movement of the wings. And I was working on South Pacific crickets -- not in the South Pacific; I had a colony of them in Oxford. And this particular cricket, Teleogryllus oceanicus, has a rather complicated song. It says PRR-prr-prr-prr-prr-prr-prr, PRR-prr-prr-prr-prr-prr-prr, PRR-prr-prr-prr-prr-prr. And that just goes on and on and on. And I wanted to know how important the details of that song were. Did it really have to have that particular pattern? And the answer was probably yes, because it was unique to that species. Related species have a different kind of song. For example, Teleogryllus commodus, a related species, said PRR-prr, PRR-prr, PRR-prr. And presumably the difference between those two crickets was significant. What I did was to write a computer program to make a computer sing like a cricket, and in which you could easily program in, using a simple sort of language which I devised, for making any cricket song you like.
So, I was able to program quickly the song of Teleogryllus oceanicus, Teleogryllus commodus, various species of gryllus and so on. And then I devised a method for measuring the attractiveness of these songs, and it was a very light seesaw made of sort of balsa wood, very light balsa wood, and at each end of the seesaw was a loudspeaker which could be made to play artificial cricket song. And you put a cricket inside the seesaw. As the cricket walked along the seesaw towards the song, the seesaw tilted and made an electrical contact, which was counted as one approach to that loudspeaker. At that point or shortly afterwards, the computer would change to making the song come out of the other loudspeaker, whereupon the cricket would turn around and walk the other way, and then the seesaw would tilt the other way. So the number of tilts of the seesaw was a measure of the attractiveness of the song. So I had it all set up to measure the rival attractiveness of different kinds of song. But then I can't remember what happened, and I switched to some other piece of research. So that piece of research was never actually done. But the apparatus that I developed and the computer program that I wrote to sing like a cricket was all working. Now it's lost for ever because it was done on now-outdated computers. You can't get that kind of computer any more. And so that's gone. 
Question: Can science shed light on any moral issues?
Richard Dawkins: Science is not in the business of shedding light on moral debates, but I think it can do sometimes -- the whole subject of moral philosophy, of examining moral questions in a logical way to expose inconsistencies, for example. When you're looking at moral questions, so-called moral questions, like abortion or euthanasia, you can show that people who take a very strong absolutist line may be being inconsistent with themselves because they are taking a strong line on one thing while at the same time inconsistently not taking a similarly strong line on another. So that would be a scientific way of thinking; it's not science per se. It's moral philosophy, but it's a kind of scientific way of thinking. But also I think scientific facts can illuminate moral debate. In the case of abortion again, for example, a scientist might contribute to the debate information about at what point during the development of an embryo the nervous system comes into being. And presumably, before the nervous system comes into existence there is no ability to feel pain or to suffer. And so maybe something important happens at the moment when the nervous system comes into being.
On the other hand, you might say, well, even when a human embryo develops a nervous system and develops the capacity to perhaps suffer, it's still a much smaller nervous system than the nervous system of an adult cow. And so what about balancing the suffering of a human embryo against the suffering of an adult cow when it's being slaughtered for meat. An absolutist moralist would say, well, humans are just plain special, and cows are not humans, so they don't deserve the same moral consideration. But a scientist might come along and say, well, what do you mean by that? I mean we are, after all, all evolved; we're all cousins.
At what point in the evolution -- since we know evolution is a fact -- at what point in the evolution of humans would you suddenly draw the line and say, all right, from now on they're all human and before that they're not? In the evolutionary progression from the common ancestors with chimpanzees, who lived about six or seven million years ago, to modern humans, going through creatures which might have looked a bit like Lucy, might have looked a bit like the newly discovered fossil Ardi, would you have given special human moral ethical consideration to Lucy? Or would you count Lucy as though she was a chimpanzee? Does this perhaps suggest to you that we shouldn't be in the business of drawing lines between species in this kind of way, and maybe these lines should be regarded as more fuzzy and less clear cut. Our absolutist moralities that do draw hard and fast lines between humans and all other species -- even taking a human fetus and calling that human, whereas an adult chimpanzee is not and doesn't deserve the same moral consideration -- is that consistent with science? These are ways that science can at least inform moral discussions.
Question: Is there ever a point where scientific reasoning can harm society?
Richard Dawkins: You can, I suppose, make a utilitarian justification for obnoxious practices. You could make a utilitarian justification for torture. Moral philosophers sometimes pose the hypothetical case where the world is about to be blown up. Only one person knows the secret password to stop the doomsday bomb going off. This one person is a suicide bomber who refuses to give up the password. Are you right to torture him? And most people, I think, say you are. I mean, it's a horrible thing to torture somebody, but under those extreme conditions, to save the world you would torture somebody. And that would be a utilitarian justification for an otherwise obnoxious practice such as torture.
Question: Are our debates over ‘big’ issues effective?
Richard Dawkins: Well, some of them are. I mean, if they're debates between two intelligent and educated people, they are conducted effectively. But if they're conducted between an intelligent, educated person on the one hand and Bill O'Reilly on the other, they're probably not, no.
Question: How could we better our public discussions?
Richard Dawkins: Perhaps have more intelligent people as television interviewers, rather than people like Bill O'Reilly, for a start. That might not be great for ratings, I suppose, but perhaps we should become less influenced by ratings. [
Question: How would our public discourse change in a world without religion?
Richard Dawkins: Well, in the moral sphere I think they would be based upon criteria such as suffering, instead of absolutist criteria like all killing of humans is wrong, for example, including killing of early human embryos. We would instead say, well, who's suffering? At what point in the balance does the suffering switch over to the other side, when there's a choice? If we got rid of absolutist moral criteria, we might stop saying human life is absolutely sacred, and you can't put a monetary value on it. And you actually do put a monetary value on it all the time, because you know, whenever you make a decision like shall we have another kidney machine, or shall we -- to what safety standards shall we build airliners, one could always make airliners a little bit safer, but it would cost a lot more money. And so we do already take decisions about that. Military aircraft are built to a less risk-averse standard than civilian aircraft. We already do make judgments of this kind. So that would be the moral -- that kind of thing would change in the moral sphere. In the scientific sphere we'd be able to get on with our science as science, and not have to worry about whether we are giving offense to people who get their beliefs from holy books rather than from evidence, which we at present have to worry about. In the field of education, we could go in for science education free to actually teach children the best science we know and teach children to use the scientific method of thinking. And once again not have to pay lip service to, or respect, the dopey beliefs of their parents who try to interfere with their scientific education.

Question: Why do humans engage in so many impractical activities?
Richard Dawkins: There are many things that humans do that have nothing to do with contributing to the survival of the individual, at least nothing obvious to do with it. So when we do mathematics and when we do poetry and when we do ballet dancing and all the things that make life worth living, it's very hard to make the case that this contributes to individual survival; it clearly doesn't. What you can make a case for is that the possession of the kind of brain that's capable of doing those things contributed to individual survival in our ancestral past. So it's not the mathematics itself; it's not that doing algebra helps anybody to survive. But having the kind of big brain that incidentally proves itself capable of doing algebra -- having that kind of big brain probably did improve our survival, whether because it literally made us better at -- I don't know -- catching prey or finding nuts or something of that sort. Or whether, in accordance with the sexual selection theory you just mentioned, it's attractive to the opposite sex.
Question: Can you elaborate on the theory of sexual selection?
Richard Dawkins: This is a theory of a man called Geoffrey Miller, who is a very interesting evolutionary psychologist. And he -- we do have a bit of a puzzle as to why the human brain did get so big, really rather suddenly; it's actually one of the more rapid pieces of evolution that we know. Over the last three million years or so the human brain has swelled up enormously. And there are various theories as to why this should be. Geoffrey Miller's theory is that, as you say, the mind is a kind of human peacock's tail, and "being clever is sexy" would be one way to put it. But it would manifest itself in the ability to -- I don't know -- remember epic poetry or something of that sort. I mean, there are all sorts of different ways in which, in particular cultures, it might manifest itself
Question: How do you feel about recent attempts to end aging?
Richard Dawkins: It's easy to see why people might wish to prolong their own lives. It's a rather selfish pursuit unless you recognize and do something about the fact that birth rates are not declining in the world as a whole, and the population is rising rapidly. There may be more people alive today than there are dead people, so to speak. I mean, it may be -- if you add up the total number of people alive and then say, how far back would you have to go in time if you integrated all dead people backwards until you reach the same number as are now alive, it would be an astonishingly long time ago. So to prolong human life in an irresponsible, profligate way would be indeed irresponsible unless you at the same time reduced birth rates. If everybody lived for ever, then we'd better stop any new people being born. Otherwise we're going to be hideously overcrowded. And it's a rather presumptuous, arrogant thing to do, some might say, to say, right, well, the present generation are the last ones to reproduce. We'd better all just sit here and enjoy our lives for thousands of years. We're obviously a long way away from that now, but I know there are some people who see that as a kind of ideal, and they certainly need to think seriously about what to do about population size.
Question: What excites you most in science today?
Richard Dawkins: I suppose in my own field of biology it would be molecular genetics. It has enormous potential. It's advancing at an extremely rapid rate, coupled with computer science, which is also advancing at an extremely rapid rate. And the two are genuinely coupled; that's no accident. Moore's Law in the world of computer science states that computer power measured in various ways increases exponentially, and its doubling time is something like eighteen months.
There's another law which I've coined Hodgkin's Law, which says that sequencing genomes, the power to read genomes, increases exponentially, and the doubling time is not quite as fast as that; it's more like twenty seven months. But Hodgkin's Law and Moore's Law are related because genetic sequencing is -- the technology is very dependent upon computers. And so part of what has fed into the increase in the rate of -- in the increase in the power to sequence genomes has been the increase in computer power, which is Moore's Law.
So the two together are rendering our world ever stranger ever faster. And the Internet as we now know it would have totally astounded me if -- when I first started using computers in the 1960s, I dimly thought that something like the Internet, mass communication, might come about. But I never thought it would be anything like as powerful as it is. I would have been just blown over backwards if somebody had suddenly plunked me in front of a modern -- pushed me forward in time to 2009 and showed me a modern computer and the modern Internet connection. The same thing is happening and is going to happen to biology with respect to genome sequencing. And it's going to become possible to sequence the genome of an individual of any species for very little money, very fast. And that's going to open up enormous vistas for biological research.
And for medicine, because it means that, for example, doctors, instead of prescribing a sort of generic treatment for the disease you've got, for an average person, will prescribe the particular treatment that you as an individual need because of the particular fingerprint of genes that you've got. And that's going to be a radical change in medicine. In biological research it means that we can just sequence the genome of any species we like very quickly. Biologists of the future may be able to catch an animal or plant in the wild, stick a probe into it and immediately read out off a sort of iPhone dial its genome. This would be an astonishing leap in research power
Question: How close do you think we are to this ability?
Richard Dawkins: Well, it's becoming -- it's coming closer all the time. It's already possible to sequence a genome for a few -- I forget how -- I forget what it is -- but I mean it's a manageable number of dollars. It's still a lot, but by 2050 it'll be possible to sequence the genome of an individual for probably tens of dollars. And that would be quite an extraordinary state of affairs.
Question: What keeps you up at night?
Richard Dawkins: I can't claim it's the state of the world. I think -- know that does keep some people up, keep them awake. With me it's more personal. It's not -- it's things like I've just founded a couple of charitable foundations, the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science, both in Britain and America, and sort of the future of those foundations, how to run them, how to manage them. Things like that keep me awake at nights. A book that I've got to finish may keep me awake. I mean, I'm not making sufficiently fast progress in the work that I'm supposed to be doing -- that's the kind of thing that troubles me at night.
Question: Who are your heroes?
Richard Dawkins: Darwin obviously. Wallace, who's the unsung hero who independently thought of the idea. Many great scientists of the past. Peter Medawar -- I admire his writing style very much. Carl Sagan. Yes, many -- I mean, I admire great poets as well. I'm not sure that I'd call them exactly heroes. I mean, Shakespeare affects me when I read his extraordinary command of language; I admire it hugely. Yeah I suppose he is -- so he is a hero, yes, whoever he was.
Question: What makes a good scientist?
Richard Dawkins: Well, that's very interesting. You asked me who my heroes were, and I said Darwin. Darwin, I think, misdiagnosed his own character traits rather. He said, I've become nothing more than a machine for grinding theories out of facts. I don't think Darwin was that at all. Darwin was a great hypothesis-former. Darwin thought of ideas; he dreamed up ideas, which is the way scientists ordinarily do work. So I think you need to be imaginative. You need to have the imagination to put together ideas which other people haven't had. You do need to be able to work hard. Sir Hans Krebs, who discovered the Krebs Cycle, once in my presence was asked, how do you get a Nobel prize -- which he had. And he said, it's easy: you come into the lab at nine o'clock in the morning, and you leave at six o'clock in the evening every day for thirty five years, or words to that effect. I don't think that's how you do it either. No doubt that's part of it. But you need a combination of that and genuine inspiration, which is akin to poetry; it's akin to great art; it's the inventive, creative leap which great scientists have.
Recorded on: October 21, 2009. Interviewed by Paul Hoffman.

Never Trust a Junkie...or a Pusher

There is a scene from the movie Sid & Nancy, where Nancy Spungen, played flawlessly by Chloe Webb, is outside leaning against a brick wall in tears, upset after having had a drink thrown in her face at the pub by some fucker who ripped her off for 50 quid. She turns to Sid, who has followed her there from the pub trying to offer comfort, and confides, "Never trust a junkie". One could also add to that, “Never trust a pusher”.

The Alberta government is just such a pusher. They, along with their partners in crime, the federal Tories (and many Liberals I might add) and the multinational oil and gas companies, want to build yet another pipeline vein into the American arm and fill it not with heroin but with bitumen, a dirty, ultra-heavy, viscous hydrocarbon, in order to keep the junkie hooked.

I would not hesitate to say that oil, in all it's forms and methods of extraction and combustion, is responsible for much more suffering and far more deaths than heroin is. And to be sure, no one in their right mind would ever defend heroin abuse.

But the Alberta and Canadian governments time and again are on the side of industry, defending the exploitation of bitumen. Touting and praising the benefits of this dirty oil to keep the user using.

Often they will downplay or outright deny any science that runs counter to what they choose to believe about the harm caused by bitumen extraction and transport. Of course they would say that. There is a lot of money at stake for them.

The pusher and his business customer, the junkie, who is too fucked up to make rational decisions, will do anything they can to keep the drug going. They will lie, cheat and steal, and come up with all sorts of justifications for why they need the drug.

In Canada, these justifications for the oil drug invariably involve those two heroes of capitalism, jobs and the economy.

Can you imagine anything more ridiculous than someone who defends heroin abuse by saying that it keeps many people employed (the growers, those who ship it, those who sell it, etc.) therefore it is good for the economy and good for us? And the reason we would find it so absurd is because we are aware of the harmful effects of heroin addiction.

Here we see that the pushers, the ones who have the most to gain and of course the most to lose, cannot be trusted to tell us the truth about their drug.

When highly respected and reputable scientists like University of Alberta Professor, Dr. David Schindler, or Treeline Environmental Research Ecologist, Dr. Kevin Timoney, et al., have illustrated irrefutable evidence on the detrimental effects of the tar sands on water quality and quantity, wildlife, the environment, and public health, one would reasonably expect that rational human beings when confronted with such data would take a step back and say, “Gee, we better change what we’re doing in order to minimize the harm caused”.

Then laws may be implemented in order to facilitate the lifestyle changes that need to take place, to see to it that individuals and society are kept safe and healthy.

That’s what reasonable people would do. But those in the Alberta government (I'm specifically looking at you Rob Renner, dishonourable Minister of the Environment) take a different approach. They scoff at facts and manufacture lies in order to keep the drug flow of oil moving.

They pretend there is controversy in the evidence where in fact, none exists. If you keep the drug user confused or withhold information from him, he will continue on his merry way of stupefied oblivion and buy your junk.

Usually the truth sets you free, but only if you act on the knowledge you have gained. You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink. True. But is the horse just being obstinate, or have you led him to drink from Syncrude’s tailings pond? Perhaps if we all had to drink the foul effluvium that leaks from these dozen or so pools into the Athabasca River (some estimates put it at 67 litres/second from just one pond) we would all be more inclined to act.

Just as surely as heroin addiction figured prominently in the deaths of Sid and Nancy, our addiction to oil, where we are now literally scraping the dirtiest, most foul part of the needle to get every last drop out of it, will spell the end of us. And in the process, we will be dragging countless other innocent creatures along with us to our grave.

It doesn't have to be this way. We could be creating healthier societies based upon cleaner, renewable and more sustainable energy sources. Wind, solar, geothermal, hydrogen, are just a few examples just waiting to be fully tapped, if only we would show the will and the desire to make it happen.

Most importantly, whatever form the future takes in how we choose to harness energy, reducing our consumption must play a key role in protecting our environment and maintaining any sort of balance with nature.

The American physicist, Professor Albert Bartlett, has summed the problem up this way:

We must realize that growth is but an adolescent phase of life which stops when physical maturity is reached. If growth continues in the period of maturity it is called obesity or cancer. Prescribing growth as the cure for the energy crisis has all the logic of prescribing increasing quantities of food as a remedy for obesity.

But, to quote another line from Sid & Nancy, as long as we’re addicts…we’ll be full of shit!

Alberta Environment Minister Rob Renner Spouts Fucking Dishonest Bullshit

Watch this series of videos by ecologist Kevin Timoney of Treeline Ecological Research, where he spells out the evidence for the tar sands polluting the Athabasca River system, and decide for yourself who is more credible...impartial biologists who do hard science, or the Alberta & Canadian governments who are nothing more than mouthpieces for multinational oil & gas companies.




This petrostate Alberta government is acting similar to the way the Bush administration acted when it came to invading Iraq or using torture. Both of these right-wing regimes employ the strategy of looking for so called "experts" to tell them what they want to hear, and if they don't receive it, they will simply manufacture the information in order to fulfill their agenda.

It makes you wonder, when these politicians time and again deny or downplay the harmful effects of the tar sands on the environment and people, how much money they are receiving from these companies to be their puppets.

It was the same when there was the mad cow scare several years back, with the meat and dairy industry ever present in the back pockets of the politicians. Rather than looking into what caused the problem, the Alberta government tried to dismiss it and launched a campaign to brainwash easily manipulated Albertans by giving away "I Heart Alberta Beef" bumper stickers. The people lapped it up like they were doing their patriotic duty as good obedient Albertans believing what their government tells them.

And why was this done? Because the exploitation and slaughter of animals is very profitable in this province. Oh sure, we love our cats and dogs (although that's not strictly true either, given the number of them who are neglected or fill our shelters) and the little birds who twitter at our feeders. But how we so easily and callously can turn a blind eye to the suffering of an animal we have learned to refer to as "food', and is not our pet. You better not have any empathic feelings toward other creatures who have the capacity to feel pain...that's just anti-Albertan.

That feeling of disrespect for nature and animals spills over into how we treat the First Nations people of this province. Don't think that bigotry doesn't play a significant role in why the government doesn't give a shit about the higher cancer rates in Fort Chipewyan being caused by tar sands pollution (though they refuse to admit that industry is responsible). The amount of racist talk I hear from narrow-minded rednecks around Alberta against native people is insidiously reflected in the kind of leadership we have.

If it were rich white people who were affected by rare cancers in anything resembling the numbers we see in Fort Chip, I guarantee you there would be more of an outcry.

And so here we are with much protest in many parts of the world over dirty Alberta bitumen. But instead of doing proper science to monitor and regulate the tar sands to ensure some level of health and safety for everyone affected, the government is handing out leases to oil companies faster than (insert jocular metaphor here).

Funny how they cannot find the money to study what the harmful effects of the tar sands really are, but they can sure as hell find the cash to indoctrinate people, like the leaders of some dangerous religious cult, into thinking this operation is all hunky dory, by launching propagandic ad campaigns that attempt to show how wonderful and beneficial the tar sands are for both people and the environment.

Well to anyone with half a brain who knows the difference between scientific facts and political manipulation, these tactics won't work...unless of course we all get a free bumper sticker saying, "I Heart Alberta Oil". That would convince me.

One thing that may play a role in halting this massive assault on water quality and quantity, wildlife, the environment, and public health, is a class action lawsuit against the Alberta and Canadian governments and the companies responsible for bringing about this end of nature, by anyone and everyone who has suffered the consequences.

Downstream (2009) - Alberta Tar Sands Documentary

If we could reverse the flow of the [Athabasca] and people in Fort McMurray had to drink the water that people in Fort Chipewyan drink, can you imagine what the reaction would be? ~ Dr. John O'Connor quoted from Tar Sands - Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent by Andrew Nikiforuk

Michael Moore on His New Book, "Here Comes Trouble"

from May 25, 2011 at the Jacob Javits Center in New York City. His new book will released in September.

Yet Another Goddamn Oil Spill

from Democracy Now! July 7, 2011


Listen here to what Montana farmer, Alexis Bonogofsky, has to say about the devastating impact the Exxon oil spill is having on the area where she lives, about 10 miles from where the rupture occurred this past Friday.

Hear how she is getting the royal runaround from Exxon-Mobil and how the company refers to this disaster as "an inconvenience".

The president of the oil pipeline company even went on to say that none of the air or water sampling has indicated any problems. WHAT THE FUCK?!

Bonogofsky says that no one has even been around to test the air and water quality around where she lives or done any soil sampling.

It would appear that Exxon is spouting these boldfaced lies merely to appease the public so it doesn't have a riot on its hands, or as Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA) said on The Rachel Maddow Show (see Ed Markey on The Rachel Maddow Show July 8, 2011 below), when these disasters happen the companies responsible are more concerned about protecting their own liability than protecting the livability of the area they have polluted.

Exxon-Mobil, and the entire oil industry, is full of shit!

from The Rachel Maddow Show July 6, 2011

Ed Markey on The Rachel Maddow Show July 8, 2011


42 thousand gallons of oil spilled into the Yellowstone river in Montana on Friday. This past May, over 1 million gallons of crude burst from a pipeline across the Peace River watershed in northern Alberta. How many more times are we going to put up with these multi-billion dollar oil & gas companies polluting the planet before we say, "enough is enough" and finally get off our addiction to this vile, filthy form of energy?

The Canadian Association of Journalists 2011 Conference

CPAC - Video on Demand

On May 13^th to 15^th, 2011, in Ottawa, the Canadian Association of Journalists held its 2011 annual conference. This May 15^th panel examined the state of the media and foreign reporting. The Participants were Sonia Verma (The Globe and Mail), Murray Brewster (The Canadian Press), Kathy Gannon (The Associated Press) and Tom Clark (Broadcaster and Journalist).

How Many More? - original song

how many more

angry people do there have to be
raising their fist in defiance
and uniting in the street

how many more
policemen on the beat
are gonna brutalize our brothers and sisters 
just for demanding their equality
how many more

how many more
lies do we have to hear
before we can know what is real
and overcome imaginary fears

how many more
chances are we gonna get
to correct the mistakes we have made
before it's too late and we're dead
how many more

we're profiting from poisoning ourselves
it's off to war creating our own hell
to keep the rich securely at the top
but we're the only ones to make it stop

how many more
hungry people do there have to be
living on a dirty city corner
'cause of somebody else's greed

how many more
things to worship do we need
never mind the other who has nothing
just protect my property
how many more

how many more
fucking times are we gonna drill
so that a few can get even richer while there
are millions that'll be killed

how many more
days are gonna pass us by
before we consider what we're doing
and stop to question why
how many more

Bill McKibben on Democracy Now! - Global Warming Right Now Is The Most Difficult Problem We Face

350 is the most important number in the world. The NASA scientists told us three years ago that any value for carbon in the atmosphere greater than 350 parts per million was not compatible with the planet on which civilization developed and to which life on earth is adapted. That is strong language. It’s stronger still when you know that everywhere, outside your studios, up on top of Mount Everest, in the Antarctic, right now we’re at about 390 parts per million CO2 and gaining fast. That’s why this is not some future problem. It is the most pressing present crisis that we have. ~ Environmentalist Bill McKibben on Democracy Now!

Companies Responsible For Causing Environmental Destruction Subvert Democracy

Wherever you see widespread environmental injury, you’re also going to see the subversion of democracy. And West Virginia is really the template for that dynamic. You’ll see the destruction of the public process at the local level, where people no longer have a say in the allocation of the public trust, the resources of the commons. You’ll see the destruction of transparency in government. You’ll see the capture of the agencies that are supposed to protect Americans from pollution. They become—in West Virginia, the West Virginia DEP has become the sock puppet for the industry that it’s supposed to regulate. You’ll see the widespread corruption of public officials, which you’ve also seen. Virtually every relevant public official in the state of West Virginia is now an indentured servant for the coal industry. And you’ll also see the destruction of the press and the role of the fourth estate. And again, in West Virginia you see the press largely blind, holding a blind eye to this wholesale destruction of the landscapes. ~ Robert Kennedy, Jr. on coal mining in West Virginia

This is exactly what is happening in Alberta with the environmental devastation caused by the tar sands.

Golf Courses in Edmonton's River Valley Destroy Nature

In the thin strip of "wilderness" along the North Saskatchewan river from Devon to Fort Saskatchewan, approximately 60 kms as the river winds, there are a total of twelve golf courses, or an average of one golf course every 5 kms. Wild nature is already tenuous in this so called ribbon of green and is eroded even further by these destructive playgrounds for the wealthy.

Not only do golf courses destroy natural habitat by the tremendous amount of space they require but the pesticides and fertilizers used further pollute and poison the natural environment.

Going for a walk south, on the west side of the river across from Fort Edmonton, your nature path amongst aspen poplar, rose bushes, red osier dogwood, squirrels, hares, deer, hawks and garter snakes will be disrupted by a golf course. Impeding further advancement of you and stripping away the wild habitat.

If you walk south of Terwillegar Park on the east side of the river, then past the Anthony Henday bridge, suddenly you come upon a sign stating, "private property, no trespassing". Once again the rich person's playground has taken away what rightfully belongs to all...wild nature. (When I saw that sign I thought of the line form Jefferson Airplane's We Can Be Together, "All your private property is target for your enemy, and your enemy is we.")

It may seem upon first appearances that Edmonton's river valley is a vast swath of trees and wildlife; and going for a walk along some of the trails can indeed give the illusion of  unspoiled nature, but it is just that...an illusion. For what isn't steep eroding cliffs (some with million dollar plus homes perched precariously atop them patiently awaiting their turn, like so many others before them, to succumb to the geological forces that shaped the valley) is really just a narrow, fragile band of green that is pushed to the brink by surrounding development and an ever expanding population demanding more and more space for itself.

In the battle between profit and exploitation versus wilderness protection, the dollar wins every time. And whatever a human desires, irrespective of the detrimental impact it may have on other creatures, his interests trump all others.

In southern British Columbia, there is a proposal on the table to make the South Okanagan-Similkameen region a national park to protect the fragile dry plateau desert ecology, but there is opposition to it coming from ranchers, wineries and other exploitative interests such as those who want to develop golf courses.

One rancher remarked he opposed the creation of a national park because it would mean that "his" cattle could not graze there. He went on to say, there needs to be a balance between the interests of the naturalists and the people in the area who make money off of the land.

I agree. A balance is what is needed. A balance implies fairness and a just, equal weight. Well right now there is a gross imbalance when it comes to money making ventures and the natural world. Pollution, global warming, entire species of plants and animals becoming extinct or pushed to the brink of extinction, all because mankind has tipped the scale in favor of himself at the expense of the other creatures he shares the planet with.

We are at a crucial point in our history, we may have even surpassed the tipping point, where natural, wild areas are being gobbled up and eaten away by private, monied interests so fast that right now all that remains are small pockets and slivers of what were once vast areas of an ecological and vibrant diversity of flora and fauna. And even these areas are not safe when surrounded on all sides by a human population that continues to push wild nature further and further into submission by causing more and more pollution, all in the name of making money.

What right do we have to kill other beings to serve our ends? It seems there are two kinds of beings in the world, us (humans) and them (all other living creatures) and any one of them that gets in the way of whatever it is we want or if we choose to enslave and kill them for profit, then we have taken it upon ourselves as our deluded right, where religion and the bible play a not insignificant role in our thinking (Gen 1:26 And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.), to treat them as though their interests do not matter.

If we do not have a consciousness raising and begin to treat other beings' interests as equal to our own, then whatever terrible fate awaits us is more than deserved. We can however change our attitude toward the natural world and the other beings we share the planet with and learn to live in harmony, respecting each individuals right just to be able to exist and be themselves, just as we would want for ourselves.

Ignorant Rednecks Get Stuck by North Saskatchewan River

in the southwest corner of edmonton toward the end of 199 st around woodbend and big island, there is an area near the north saskatchewan river with wetlands, poplar forests and wildlife. it is here that a company, kanata, wants to create a gravel pit to extract sand to build roads or whatever it is one does with extracted sand.

the company is a metis cultural enterprise that says this project will create jobs. fucking sell-outs. once again it is monied interests that win out over pristine nature. i thought native people were supposed to care about the environment, not rape the earth for the sake of a dollar.

at any rate, i wanted to check out the area in question for myself so i went down to take a look at it. it's hard to get to because private property blocks the way to the river and there are many signs that say no trespassing. i guess as long as you have the money, you can take away what rightfully belongs to all, namely the enjoyment of wild nature.

i saw more than a few signs that said "stop the gravel pit", but it seems to me that the rich property owners around there care more about "not in my backyard" than they do about not destroying nature. if they cared about nature they wouldn't have these huge properties and houses that are responsible for already displacing much of the wildlife.

when i finally did find a spot to walk to the river, the area was crisscrossed with rutty 4X4 tracks; and here and there lay empty beer cans and cardboard cases. it was a real pity. this was indeed a beautiful place but this didn't seem like wild nature to me.

wherever there is something beautiful in the natural world, businesses are out to exploit it, or fucking rednecks are out to destroy it. the ignorant redneck way of  "enjoying nature" is drinking beer outside and killing animals.

and then i came upon these two beer-swilling cunts who got a little more than they bargained for from mother nature...

The Majority of Canadians Said "NO!" to Stephen Harper

Hey, Stephen Harper! You can take your "majority government" and your environment destroying redneck policies and shove them straight up your ass!

And another thing...just wait until the next election!

The Problem With Canadian Democracy

60% of Canadians don't want the Conservatives in power, yet Stephen Harper has a majority government. What's wrong with this picture?

And even with the 167 of 308 seats in the House of Commons, 54.2% is not exactly an overwhelming mandate to implement or kill any policies or bills they feel like.

No matter how much Stephen Harper and his band of right-wing Blue Meanies harp on about what Canadians want, or how the people have spoken, there are nearly 34 million Canadians; 24 million of whom are eligible to vote, and of the 15 million who cast their ballots, only 6 million voted Conservative.

Yes, Stephen Harper, the people have spoken and they overwhelmingly rejected you and your party's policies. Yet here we are with a Conservative majority.

In 2008, the Conservatives had 37.6% of the popular vote and 143 seats. In this election they had 39.6% of the popular vote and 167 seats. A 2% increase in votes and a 24 seat gain? That just 'aint right!

This is not even a tyranny of the majority. It's a tyranny of the misguided, greedy and ignorant minority and now the 28 million Canadians who were either ineligible to vote; didn't vote; or voted for someone else, have to suffer the consequences of our seriously flawed electoral system and a Harper pro-corporate, anti-environment regime for at least the next 4 years.

This is not what democracy should look like.

This Royal Wedding Frenzy Should Embarrass Us All

from Democracy Now! 4/29/2011

If we're going to spend $100 million on this, we have to spend a comparable amount of money distributing anti-nausea tablets across the world to all the people who can't bear to see all this! ~ Johann Hari, columnist at The Independent of London

Gov. Rick Snyder Corporatizing, Privatizing & Profitizing Michigan's Public School System

...and wall street can't wait to sink their fangs into it! Lansing, MI Mayor Virg Bernero on The Rachel Maddow Show 4/28/2011

MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell Shuts Up Idiot Birther Orly Taitz

from The Last Word With Lawrence O'Donnell 4/27/2011

Tim DeChristopher Powershift 2011 - What Level of Injustice Do We Have To Condone Before We Fight Back?

Vandana Shiva & Maude Barlow on Democracy Now! 4/22/2011

AMY GOODMAN: As the world celebrates Earth Day, Bolivia is about to pass the world’s first law that grants nature equal rights with humans. The Bolivian delegation to the United Nations urged the global body to adopt a similar law during this week’s Harmony with Nature conference.

DAVID CHOQUEHUANCA: [translated] The United Nations is revolutionizing the way we look at our planet. At the moment, various issues are being receded in the United Nations, and we have begun to discuss the idea of declaring an official International Day of Mother Earth. And we will also soon be discussing what are the rights of Mother Earth.

AMY GOODMAN: That was the Bolivian foreign minister speaking in New York City about the Harmony with Nature dialogue at the United Nations.
This week also marks the one-year anniversary of the BP oil spill; next week, the 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster. Radiation levels around the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan remain high. As these disasters multiply, Latin American countries such as Bolivia have taken the lead in adopting measures to protect the environment. Ecuador has also adopted a resolution protecting nature.
We speak with two renowned environmental justice activists: Maude Barlow and Vandana Shiva. Maude Barlow is the head of the Council of Canadians, Canada’s largest public advocacy organization. Barlow is also co-founder of the Blue Planet Project and chair of the board of Food and Water Watch. Vandana Shiva, world-renowned environmental leader, feminist and thinker from India, is the author of many books, including Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability, and Peace and Staying Alive: Women, Ecology, and Development.
I started our conversation by asking Vandana Shiva about the nuclear catastrophe in Japan and what it has meant for India, where major anti-nuclear protests have been sparked, in which one protester was killed. I asked her to explain what happened.

VANDANA SHIVA: We have a very, very strong anti-nuclear movement in India. And the difference between the Indian movement and any other movement is it’s not just about the stupidity of splitting the atom to boil water, which is what nuclear power ultimately is, creating huge amounts of radiation hazard in the process, but in India it involves the typical violence of land grab. And one of the most fertile parts of India in the Western Ghats, the Ratnagiri district, this planning to set up the biggest-ever nuclear power plant of the world, being built by a French company, AREVA, violating every right of the people, including local democracy, where people have a right to decide what happens. All the local authorities have resigned. And the protests continue. And just two days ago, there was a killing, when the police fired on peaceful protesters. So, in India, the costs are even higher, because the human costs join with the costs of nuclear hazard. And from 23rd to 26th, a march is being organized—and I’m part of the organizing group—from Tarapur, which is the oldest nuclear power plant of India, to Jaitapur, which is where this giant mega nuclear power park is being set up.

AMY GOODMAN: And people live there. They will be displaced?

VANDANA SHIVA: People live there. I mean, typical of such things, they claimed it was barren land and nobody was there. It’s one of the most fertile. That’s where this wonderful Alphonso mango comes from, this amazing, giant-sized, delicious mango. Good fisheries, amazing horticulture, and well-to-do people, because nature is abundant. It’s the Western Ghats, where the monsoon just pours the water. And coastal regions are usually just the more productive, more fertile.

A similar protest is happening around a steel plant called POSCO, a Korean plant, but it’s not owned by the Koreans anymore, it’s owned by Wall Street. It’s owned by the financial institutions of this city, who brought down the world’s economy. And it was very interesting that Warren Buffett was in India about giving, you know, creating the art of giving, and he has huge shares in the steel plant which will displace large numbers of people. And for six years, people have been saying, "No, we will not give our land."

And I think that’s so important, that we need to realize that, first, we don’t give rights to nature. Nature has rights. And more often than not, nature’s rights and people’s rights are allied as one in most places of the world, where, in places like Jaitapur or places like the POSCO area, people are saying, "This land is our mother." This is not an esoteric idea. It’s the most relevant, potent, democratic idea of our times.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to ask you about a man you probably would agree with on a number of issues, George Monbiot. He, we recently had on, debating the issue of nuclear power. This is what he had to say.

GEORGE MONBIOT: Well, obviously, what happened—what’s happening in Fukushima concerns me a lot about the area surrounding Fukushima. It’s a horrible, dangerous, extremely traumatic series of events that we are seeing there.

But I’m very worried that the global response to what’s happening in Fukushima will be to shut down nuclear power stations around the world and to cancel future nuclear power stations, and that what will happen is that they will be replaced by coal. Now, coal is hundreds of times more dangerous than nuclear power, not just because of climate change, though, of course, climate change is a big one, but also because of industrial accidents and because of the impacts of pollution on local people. If we just look at industrial accidents alone, these massively outweigh both the fatalities and the injuries caused by any nuclear accident we’ve ever seen. In China alone, last year, 2,300 people were killed in industrial accidents to do with coal mining; purely by coal mining accidents, 2,300 killed. That’s six people a day. That means that in one week, the official death toll from coal in China is greater than the official death toll from Chernobyl in 25 years. And that’s to say nothing of the hundreds of thousands of people contracting really unpleasant lung diseases, which will cause them a very slow and painful and terrible death.

So, what I’m calling for here is not complacency. I think it’s absolutely appropriate to be very concerned, indeed, about what’s happening in Fukushima. But I’m calling for perspective, and I’m saying that we must not replace a bad technology with a much, much worse one, because, unfortunately, that is what’s likely to happen.

AMY GOODMAN: So that was the well-known British columnist George Monbiot, who is in favor of nuclear power, says it’s simply cleaner than coal, and if we’re talking about climate change, which he’s deeply concerned about, nuclear is the answer.

VANDANA SHIVA: Well, what we really need is a coal-free and nuclear-free future, because the sun’s energy is so abundant, and we’ve not even started to tap it in sensible ways. Alternative renewable energies, if only we would put the investments in that direction, would be affordable, would be decentralized. Nuclear must be a centralized system. And as we are witnessing in Jaitapur with the protests, with the shootings and the killings and the place turned into a total police state where nobody can gather, even the elected officials can’t hold meetings, where democracy has to be sacrificed, that’s not the kind of option we need for energy.

And I think it’s wrong of George Monbiot to rubbish the point of view of millions of people around the world, including governments, like the government of Germany said, "We won’t build any more nuclear power plants," China, which has put everything on hold. Now, these countries aren’t crazy. They aren’t a fringe. And I personally get disappointed when friends like George Monbiot think they are the wisest ones on this planet. And just because they have a column, they can switch everyone’s way of thinking. There is an ancient recognition of the hazards of nuclear. I began my life in the nuclear industry of India, and it’s when my sister woke me up to the damages. I wasn’t ever taught radiation biology. We were just taught physics, fission physics. And I realized it was very partial knowledge.

AMY GOODMAN: You are a physicist.

VANDANA SHIVA: Yes. And then I did theoretical physics, and eventually I did foundations of quantum theory. And what I love about the rights of Mother Earth is we’re overcoming the separation between humans and nature that was built into the Cartesian thinking that nature is out there and we are out here, but also the kind of divisive separatedness that Cormac [Cullinan] pointed out yesterday at the United Nations conference on Harmony with Nature. He said, "I began my life fighting apartheid, and apartheid means separateness—separateness on the basis of color." I think separateness is the disease of the past. It’s the dinosaur in the intellectual frame. Separateness was a very artificial imposition. Most civilizations of the world, for most of human history, have seen the world in terms of relatedness and connection. And if there’s one thing the rights of Mother Earth is waking us to, is we are all connected. And it’s in that connection we can’t have arrogant solutions, like nuclear is clean. Just because you don’t see the radiation doesn’t make it clean. Fukushima has become like Chernobyl, and that, the Japanese government is recognizing.

AMY GOODMAN: And so, Maude Barlow, why are you here in New York at the United Nations on this Earth Day?

MAUDE BARLOW: Well, there’s been the debate this week—an interactive dialogue, it’s called—at the United Nations on a resolution on Harmony with Nature that was introduced by the Bolivian ambassador to the U.N. but was adopted by the General Assembly. So we’re beginning the discussion and dialogue at the United Nations on the concept of the right to water. A number of us were in Cochabamba a year ago, this Mother Earth Day, when we finalized this draft of this Universal Declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth. And so, basically, we’re here to introduce it to the U.N. The concept—we eventually want the Universal Declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth to be a companion piece to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but we’re not there yet. We understand that. But that’s the goal, both within nation states at the United Nations and then just organizationally. We want people to adopt it and start talking about it. And we have a wonderful new book called The Rights of Nature: The Case for the Universal Declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth. So, this is a beginning of a real process to have a larger dialogue on exactly what Vandana’s saying.

AMY GOODMAN: What is the threat to water in the world today?

MAUDE BARLOW: Well, the threat to water, while just speaking about nuclear, is a wonderful example. It was interesting. I just—and it’s a perfect example of what we’re talking about when we say that we have to recognize nature’s rights—and Vandana is right: it’s not giving, it’s recognizing—is a report I saw the other day on the fish, you know, touched by the radiation contamination from the nuclear plant in Japan, and said, "Don’t worry. By the time it gets to humans, it won’t be harmful." And it was like that’s all that mattered. You know, it’s this human-centric notion that we’re all that matters, that other species of the planet doesn’t matter.

The biggest threat to water in our world is that humans, modern humans, quote, "civilized" humans, see water as a huge resource for our pleasure, profit and convenience, and we do what we want with it. We dump whatever we want in it. We grow whatever we want, wherever we want. We move it wherever we want. And we are running out. There’s a brand new report, says by 2030 the demand in our world for water will outstrip supply by 40 percent. And I don’t know if people can get their heads around how a horrific statistic that is and the suffering that that’s going to cause. You know, you can come at this as some—and, you know, people are already joking: "Oh, you’re talking about rights for ticks and rights for rats." That was—you know, this is the right wing mocking what we’re doing. We’re talking about survival here. We’re talking about human and other species’ survival on this planet, if we don’t change the way we see the world, the way we see nature, the way we see water. It is not a big resource for us. It is the essential—these are the essential elements of a living ecosystem that gives us all life, and this is about survival.

AMY GOODMAN: Maude Barlow, head of the Council of Canadians, Canada’s largest advocacy group, and Vandana Shiva, environmental leader from India. Among her books, Staying Alive: Women, Ecology, and Development. We’ll come back to this Earth Day conversation in a minute.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: We’re on the road in Washington, D.C., on this Earth Day. We rejoin our conversation with Vandana Shiva, the renowned scientist and environmentalist from India, and Maude Barlow. She’s head of the Council of Canadians, and, well, among her books, Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis and the Fight for the Right to Water.

AMY GOODMAN: We saw you in Cochabamba last year when we were covering the conference, the gathering of tens of thousands of people around the rights of Mother Earth, Pachamama, as they said there. Why is Bolivia and Ecuador taking the lead here?

MAUDE BARLOW: Well, partly because they have governments that actually represent a lot of the will of their people. And I can’t imagine what that feels like. We’re going through an election in Canada, and we’re just tearing our hair out, because we’re going to get a bad government again. So I think, partly, you’ve just got a government closer to the needs of the people.

But the Andes are melting. I mean, we have a crisis. A brand new study last week from the Foundation of U.S. Scientists said that La Paz, which is the capital of Bolivia, is in great crisis with a terrible drought threatening the two million inhabitants because of climate crisis. And unless something dramatic changes in a very short period of time, they don’t see any way around this. So it’s affecting their food, it’s affecting their access to water. So it’s very immediate. When you have this kind of immediacy, I think people like the president of Bolivia, Morales, and his ambassador to the United Nations, Pablo Solón, just say, "I don’t care if you like me or not. I’m not particularly here for a popularity contest. I’m here because we’re talking about life and death of the people where we live. And we need to get that urgency out there." And that was—it was Bolivia that led the charge on getting the right to water recognized. And so, similarly, very interesting that it would be the same government—it was Bolivia that said no to the so-called consensus that happened in Cancún, which was based on a market model for the so-called solution to climate. So—

AMY GOODMAN: And what’s wrong with the market model?

MAUDE BARLOW: The market—well, Vandana will have so much to say, too. But basically, the—and the U.N. has just put a huge price tag on nature now. The whole answer, not just to climate crisis, but to the water crisis and the forest crisis, is to put a dollar figure on nature and bring nature into the market system, so that basically all of nature has to compete with other uses for it in order to survive. And it basically—it’s a recipe for disaster. It’s a recipe for the wealthy of the world and the powerful within countries claiming, well, they’re, you know, so much more than others and so much more than nature.

AMY GOODMAN: Vandana Shiva, you’ve been taking on corporations in India and around the world, but talk about the corporatization of nature.

VANDANA SHIVA: I think the consequences of the corporatization of nature is, first and foremost, that at a time where we should be recognizing the integrity of nature, the prior rights of nature, nature’s generosity, the generosity of the earth to provide us life itself, we are going headlong into the path of hallucination, where we’ve assumed we are not just separate, but we are continuing the idea of mastery and conquest over nature, adding to the technological tools, like the idea that we can control nature through nuclear power. Now we want to control nature through market mechanisms and commodification.

Why is that wrong? Firstly, it’s wrong because nature is too rich, too diverse. We know too little about it. So, whatever price we’ll put will be partial. It’ll never catch the whole story. We have not even begun to find out the soil organisms that give us food. We don’t know how different species hang together in a forest to create that amazing biodiversity of the forest. So it will be linear. It will just be just carbon functions, when that’s not the only function of a forest. And it will definitely not take into account the integrity of species. I started Navdanya and saving seeds when I found out that corporations wanted to patent life, when life is not created by them. It is created sui generis. It is part of creation.

But there’s a second problem with the commodification of nature. And that is that it gives a new legitimacy to appropriate and alienate the resources that support people’s lives, especially the resources of the poor. So, what do we see with this new thinking of commodification of nature? We see the biggest land grab that Africa has ever seen, much worse than anything that happened during colonialism. In India, the land grab for mining, for nuclear power plants, for steel plants, is literally becoming a war zone. There’s a green hunt that’s being implemented. Our dear, dear friend, Dr. Binayak Sen, someone like us, was thrown into jail for life imprisonment. Thank goodness the Supreme Court just a few days ago granted him bail, saying that if you carry literature on Marx, it doesn’t make you a Naxalite, just as much as carrying Gandhi’s biography doesn’t make you a Gandhian.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, wait. Stop for a second, because very few people follow this story. And Democracy Now!'s Anjali Kamat went and spent the weekend at the Sens', has been bringing us reports on Dr. Binayak Sen. But in a nutshell, explain his case and the significance of it.

VANDANA SHIVA: Well, Dr. Binayak Sen, as I said, is a dear friend, a medical doctor who has worked to serve the tribals all his life. He was a gold medalist from one of the leading medical colleges of India, but decided instead to go to the villages. He and his wife, Ilina, have worked with the tribals. I’ve worked with them to help set up community seed banks for seed conservation, like we do in Navdanya. Binayak has been working to set up primary healthcare initiatives. And he was also the head of the People’s Union of Civil Liberties.

Now, the commodification and globalization of the resource grab has meant that this area where he worked, which is now called Chhattisgahr, a new state—it’s a very mineral-rich area—that’s where the corporations are going for iron ore. That’s where they’re going for coal mining. And that means they’re violating the rights of the tribals that are institutionalized now in our constitution. We have a Panchayati Raj extension to scheduled areas, which basically means the tribals decide what happens to their land. And when they started to decide—and I was at these public hearings in the early days when, in the '90s, when this law was passed, one after the other, tribals would say, "We don't want money. We want our land. We want our forest. We want our home. We want to live with Mother Earth." That’s when the violence started. And I wouldn’t be surprised if there isn’t a global advising system going on. But now there are private militias in addition to 70,000 paramilitary troops that have been deployed in tribal areas, in the name of controlling the Maoists, but really to flush out the tribals, create an empty land, so the minerals can be grabbed.

Binayak wrote a report for the People’s Union for Civil Liberties, being the vice president, and said this militia was killing innocent tribals. It became the first report. That’s what really got the government very angry with him. And they were targeting him for very long. Eventually they arrested him, planted fake evidence, like putting some letters into someone else’s bag and saying they were handed over by Binayak. It’s a long story; I won’t go into details. But Binayak, who is a medical hero of India, he’s a civil liberties hero of India, he is as good as you can live a life for the people, in service of the people, thrown into prison for life imprisonment. And that’s why his case is so significant, because it’s like, you know, in the Nazi time, you remember that poetry that the priest wrote: "I wasn’t a unionist, so I didn’t speak. And I wasn’t a"—

AMY GOODMAN: "First they came for the unionists; I didn’t speak."

VANDANA SHIVA: Yeah, yeah. And it’s exactly like that. They’ve made a test case of Binayak to say, "Any of you who stand for the rights of Mother Earth, who stand for the rights of people to their resources, watch out. If we can do this to a Binayak, we can do it to you." And that’s why I really believe we are at this watershed. We’ll either go the democratic route, recognizing the rights of Mother Earth, living within the limits of the planet, living a good life with less wastage of resources, or we will go very fast into the path of fascism, militarization. And commodificaton of nature has to be a militarized commodification in today’s time.

AMY GOODMAN: What does "earth democracy" mean, Vandana Shiva?

VANDANA SHIVA: For me, earth democracy means, first, recognizing the fundamental fact that we are part of nature, that human rights and nature’s rights are not separate, because we are just one strand in this amazing mystery and miracle that the earth has created in terms of life. But earth democracy also means democracy in the everyday life of people, exercised daily by ordinary people, not the once in a five-year or four-year election, because everywhere around the world, we are seeing, you can bring someone to power, and they don’t represent your will anymore.

So, democracy under corporate control has mutated from "of the people, by the people, for the people" into "of the corporations, by the corporations, for the corporations." In this country, I watched how Wisconsin suddenly became a playground for destruction of democracy and destruction of the fundamental rights of collective bargaining and public services and public domain, only because there is this corporate pressure on privatizing everything and preventing people from exercising their democratic rights. So, it’s the democratic rights of the people and the earth versus the fictitious corporate rights that corporations have assigned to themselves, and now they’re costing the earth and people too much. They’re bringing nothing in return. It used to be the case that when General Motors put out a car, it gave employment. It even gave salaries so people could buy that car. Today, the corporations give nothing back to society. They just take from nature, take from society, and want to rubbish this planet and rubbish our lives. And I think people are getting fed up. The entire rising in the Arabic world is part of that fed-upness.

AMY GOODMAN: It is also, Maude Barlow, the first anniversary of the BP oil disaster. You come from Canada. There was just a protest around fracking, around BP, around tar sands. Can you talk about what we should understand about where we are headed? In this year, offshore drilling, President Obama said it could resume. People in the United States hardly know what tar sands is, though we get much energy, oil, from Canada.

MAUDE BARLOW: Well, at current rate of growth, the tar sands will become, in the quite soon foreseeable future, the worst site of greenhouse gas emissions in the world. Enormous amounts of water is being destroyed. They’ve taken down a forest, this boreal forest the size of Greece. And there are children in the downstream First Nations communities with bile duct cancer at the age of four. I mean, it is an absolute horror. And what Americans need to know is that it’s coming to a community near you in the form of this dirty oil, the bitumen actually being piped by pipeline over the Ogallala Aquifer to be refined in the Gulf, or there are other pipes now taking it and more to be built to take it to the American side of the Great Lakes. It is corrosive, it’s poison, and it will destroy the water systems if it leaks, which I promise it will.

We also have gas fracking all over North America. This has become just an absolute obsession with people who know about the danger to water, because, of course, what you’re required to do is put massive amounts of chemicals into the water and then steam-blast it into the rock horizontally and to release the gas. And we’re even seeing operations along the Saint Lawrence River, and even the Quebec government has just given operations the OK to explore right within the Saint Lawrence River. And that’s not allowed on the American side, by the way. Usually we say, "Oh, it’s worse on the U.S. side," but it’s not in this case. It’s worse on the Canadian side.

I think the point here, to make the connection to the rights of nature, is that while our governments make noise about caring about the environment and make—on Earth Day, will all make, you know, strong statements about this, all of their actions belie this, from trade agreements, which we continue massively to promote around the world—the bilaterals, there are close to 3,000 of them now—to these big new CETAs, they’re called, Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreements, which are not just national procurement, but sub-national procurement. That’s water systems and roads and mining operations and municipalities and schools. It’s everything. It’s the next level down, where corporations are going to actually be able to dictate the conditions under which local funding is—how you spend your local money and on what values, and be able to stop fair trade bans and that kind of thing. All of that is galloping along. And this is so-called green economy, as it is seen by the powerful in our world, is basically no change, continued unlimited growth, continued unlimited free trade agreements, continued unregulated investment of the type that’s taking place with the land grab in Africa, but with a green technology. So we’ll just substitute that dirty old technology, which of course they’re not, because the tar sands is the dirty old technology, and that’s what they’re building it on. So it’s just language around caring for the earth.

And what we’re trying to say is that if we’re really going to survive as a species, and if the planet is to survive in any condition as we understand it, we have to shift our thinking and stop thinking of ourselves as being above nature and stop thinking of ourselves as having the rights that no other species has or no other form of the earth has. We just have to change. What would the world look like if we could see it differently? Right now, for most environmentalists, the best we ever get is that we negotiate the amount of toxics being dumped into a particular system, or in the tar sands, all we’re—I mean, all we’ve ended up doing is having a series of reports, which just tell us how bad it is, but we haven’t—we have not managed to stop one pipeline. We have not managed to stop one government expansion, one corporate expansion, in the tar sands in all the years we’ve been fighting it. And I don’t see, frankly, Amy, how we’re going to do that, unless we have a mindset change. I really—I think right now it’s just a negotiation about how much of this toxic waste we’re going to allow and dump into our waters and our air and how much genetic damage we’re going to do as—

AMY GOODMAN: And the mind shift would be what? What do you see needs to happen?

MAUDE BARLOW: The mind shift is that we are a species like any other and that we will not survive unless we place our rights in tandem with the rights of the earth, and then we understand that we come from the earth. Everything we have, everything we wear, everything we eat, everything we touch comes from the earth. And if we don’t change our minds, if we don’t change the way we see the world, if we don’t stop thinking of ourselves as superior, we’re not going to survive. And I see it as an evolutionary step, a human—an evolutionary step in our human development, if we could actually come to this.

And I think that there’s a comparison to the 1948 Declaration of Human Rights, because they fought really hard for that. And people will still say, "Well, what did it mean?" because human rights are still being violated. Well, just because a universal value is broken doesn’t mean it’s not a universal value to have. And we have to add to the universal value of the right of humans, these fundamental rights of humans, the right of the earth to survive and for us to survive together.

VANDANA SHIVA: And I think the more key issue, Amy, is, actually, this is a majority perspective. Most of the indigenous cultures of the world, most of the non-industrialized cultures of the world, most of the non-Western cultures of the world live in the consciousness that we are part of nature and the earth is a mother. We are fighting against dams on the Ganges. And it’s a very real discourse that the Ganges is a divine mother. She has her own standing. And the government cannot block her flow. She has a right to flow free. It’s a real serious discussion in India today. That’s the basis of fighting the dams, not only the environmental impact in terms of displacement. All the work we’ve done against patenting of life, bringing back the integrity of species.

And I think if you really start to connect the dots, you realize that we are at the kind of moment where we were when slavery was being abolished, people. There were crazies then who thought it was right to trade in human beings and own them as property. A few people thought it was wrong. It took a while, but we would never today imagine it’s right to own other human beings. Well, property in nature, property in life forms, patents on life, privatizing water, commodity trading of carbon pollution, the emissions treaty, all of that is as insane and as mad as slavery was. And we need to get out of this bondage, which has been created by a very tiny minority, who have lots to gain by raping the earth and destroying the rights of people.

AMY GOODMAN: One last question, and we just have a minute. Your assessment, as we move into the 2012 presidential election in the United States, of President Obama, from Canada, from India? Maude Barlow?

MAUDE BARLOW: I wish he would stand up for what I think is deepest in his heart, and I wish he would stop giving the other side’s line to the world. We don’t need him to describe or promote the compromises that he’s made. We really desperately need leadership. And I just hope that he understands that that’s the most important thing he can do for us all.

AMY GOODMAN: Vandana Shiva?

VANDANA SHIVA: Well, you know, President Obama has often said Gandhi is his big inspiration. And Gandhi had told us the earth has enough for everyone’s needs, but not for a few people’s greed. When Obama came to India, instead of talking Gandhi, instead of building a common world from U.S. to India on that Gandhian vision of everyone living well with less, he came only to seek $50 billion deals for corporations, for fighter jets, for India joining hands for the invasion of Africa for land grab and the so-called green revolution. I do wish that Obama would exercise the policies that have brought him the inspiration that brought him to power.

AMY GOODMAN: Vandana Shiva, Maude Barlow, thanks so much for joining us on Earth Day.

MAUDE BARLOW: Thank you.

VANDANA SHIVA: Happy Earth Day!

AMY GOODMAN: Environmental leader Vandana Shiva, among her books, Staying Alive: Women, Ecology, and Development. And Maude Barlow, head of the Council of Canadians. Coming up, Van Jones, Tim DeChristopher, Bill McKibben. We’ll be back in 30 seconds.