The author and others participate in the Walk to Heal the Tar Sands in 2009. Photo courtesy Occupy Love / Velcrow Ripper.

A couple years ago I was asked by the Keepers of the Athabasca to be Master of Ceremonies for a unique event: the first annual walk to heal the Canadian tar sands.

It took place in the region of the most controversial energy project on earth. The idea was not to have a protest, but instead to engage in a meaningful ceremonial action to pray for the healing of Mother Earth, which has been so damaged by the tar sands industry. Members of the five First Nations of the Athabasca region and residents of the nearby town of Fort McMurray, Alberta, tired of the never-ending fight with big oil and its supporters in the Canadian government, had made a conscious choice to protect their way of life. This was done by turning to ceremony and asking through prayer and the physical act of walking on the earth for the hearts of those harming Mother Earth through extreme energy extraction to be healed.

By extreme energy extraction, I’m talking about practices like tars sands mining and fracking, which the oil and gas industry has had to resort to now that most of the easy-to-find liquid crude is gone. By scraping the earth for fossil fuels that are mixed with sand and rock, these techniques do tremendous damage to the places where they occur.

My journey started in Fort McMurray, also know as tar sands boom town. Many have described this place as the land of milk and honey, a place were you can trade five years of your life (and soul) and be financially “set up.” I met with a motley crew of activists, elders, and youth from Fort Chipewyan, Fort McKay, Anzac, and the metro areas of Calgary and Edmonton, as well as some allies who had traveled from as far as British Columbia and beyond.

The plan was to take vehicles to the beginning of the infamous stretch of road that branches off of Highway 63 to form a ring through the tar sands. This road has gained a notorious reputation due to the many people killed in accidents there—including 46 between 2007 and 2012. Its traffic rivals that of downtown New York City, and gets especially heavy during two daily shift changes.

Our plan was to pray, make offerings to the four directions, and walk through the heart of tar sands development as concerned elders, parents, and youth.

Footage and music courtesy of the film Occupy Love, edited by Velcrow Ripper.

Highway 63 is the only road to Fort McKay Cree Nation, one of Canada's wealthiest yet most polluted First Nations, where water needs to be trucked in daily to meet the community’s needs. The highway loops past vast human-made deserts in the form of tailings ponds wet and dry, and then past an archaic Suncor/Petro-Canada facility with black carbon-stained cracking towers that belch hellfire into the morning sky. The highway finally meets the junction that leads to Fort McKay and continues onward past the industrial metropolis that is Syncrude, Canada's largest tar sands operator, operated largely by ExxonMobil.

The Syncrude site is like something straight out of a science fiction movie. From the road, you can see glimmering stainless steel cracking towers that separate bitumen into synthetic oil, a massive tank farm, lego-like worker sleeping facilities stacked upon one another, and two half-built pyramids of sulfur (a by-product of the bitumen upgrading process) being built toward the sky like modern Towers of Babel.

Then comes what is probably the most absurd element of insanity on the Highway 63 loop: the buffalo demonstration project and reclamation site.

Yeah, you heard right. Some executive from Syncrude got it into their head that having live buffalo living under the stacks of their tar sands upgrader would be a good thing for the image of the tar sands industry. A herd of the most symbolic animals of our native heritage is subject to a slow poisonous death, its members grazing in toxic fields with an apocalyptic backdrop of tailings ponds and smoke stacks billowing white clouds of toxic death overhead.

But the absurdity doesn’t end there. A few years back, some of these poor beasts were culled and distributed to elders in local First Nations. Instead of eating it, they had it sent away and tested. The tests came back showing that the meat was poisoned with heavy metals and other toxic compounds, which was present in concentrations hundreds of times above what is deemed acceptable for human consumption.

Shattered landscapes

During our preparations for the walk we discussed many fears about the risks involved in exposing our community to the contaminated and dangerous environment. Walkers were also scared that police would arrest them. Another fear was of the tar sands workers whizzing past us at 60 miles an hour or more in their semis and pickup trucks, as well as the infamous tar sands dump trucks, which are so large they look like a three story suburban home on wheels.

With these fears in our minds, we chose to listen instead to our hearts and to allow ourselves to be led by local First Nations elders into the tar sands Highway 63 loop. What I saw on the walk generated such a twisted feeling in my heart that I feel like I cannot articulate it. But I can try.

The landscape was unlike anything I had ever seen before. I walked past a tailings pond so big that it covered the horizon for miles, fed by a 24 inch wide pipe spewing a yards-high flow of liquid hydro-carbon waste so toxic that water fowl who land in it die within minutes. We saw from up close the hellfires of the Suncor/Petro-Canada stacks, with their 50-foot flames shooting up into the sky. I wondered what madness allowed Suncor to build them 500 meters away from the precious Athabasca River, which so many First Nations, Metis, and Inuit communities depend on for water.

As we walked, I pondered all of the battlefields that the emerging international movement to stop the tar sands and its associated infrastructure of pipelines, refineries, and shipping lanes is engaged with. I was overcome by the magnitude of our undertaking, picking a fight with the most inhumane and wealthiest corporations on the planet. As I put one foot in front of the other, I realized that if we did not focus our best efforts on stopping the era of extreme energy that this wasteland represented, we would be locked into a series of never-ending fights against pipelines, shipping lanes, and refineries across the continent.

No, I thought, that cannot work. This beast must be smothered to death at the source.

A powerful ceremony

At the beginning of the day, before the walk started, we argued about the right way to do the ceremony. What I know is that a bear showed itself to us at the start of our walk and that it carried with it the teachings of courage and protection. Later, an eagle flew over us and it represented the teaching of truth and unconditional love.

While we walked, we made offerings of tobacco and water on four strategic points along Highway 63. We prayed to each of the four directions and to called upon spirit, creator, mother earth, and all of the sacred elements to both heal the land and to touch the hearts, minds, and spirits of those responsible for her desecration. This was done so that the people destroying her could truly understand what they were doing. And wake up.

We did not get a huge global media sweep when our walk was finished. As a matter of fact, many of us got sick with what would become known in subsequent healing walks as the tar sands healing walk flu. We also found that our biggest supporters during that first walk were the tar sands workers and Fort McKay community members honking their horns and boosting our spirits with every honk. (The children on the walk made it a game to get the drivers to honk).

The tar sands healing walk was one of the most powerful ceremonies I have ever been a part of, comparable to our most sacred ceremony back home: the Sundance.

Something happened when we all decided to take a break from the battle with big oil, national and provincial governments, and the banks that finance them. When we decided to instead focus all of our intentions, our power and our love on healing our most sacred Mother and those that depend on her health through prayer, ceremony, and the physical act of walking together, we led with our hearts.

Next healing walk is in July

This year’s Healing Walk will be number four, which in many native circles is a very significant number: four directions, four nations of the earth. This walk marks the end of one cycle and perhaps the beginning of a new one in the battle against big oil.

A Walk to Heal the Tar Sands
Take an 8-mile trek with indigenous groups through one of the world's largest ecological dead zones, and you might find something life-giving.

This year’s walk and associated events will take place in Fort McMurray from July 4 to 6. The former Chief of Smith’s Landing Treaty 8 First Nation and respected Dene Elder Francois Paulette and the Athabasca Chipewyan Dene Nation Chief Allan Adam will both be speaking at a pre-conference on July 5 in the Metis settlement of Anzac.

They will be joined by author, activist, and founder of 350.org Bill McKibben; author and 350.org board member Naomi Klein; former U.S. vice presidential candidate, author, and Native American activist Winona LaDuke; and First Nations hip hop artist and activist Wabanakwut (Wab) Kinew.

The walk and ceremony for Mother Earth and her Peoples will take place on July 6. We invite you to join us in this historic occasion by either traveling to Alberta's tar sands in person and walking side by side with us, or by holding an event or ceremony in your home territory in solidarity.

Clayton Thomas-Muller is a member of the Mathias Colomb Cree Nation, also known as Pukatawagan, in Northern Manitoba, Canada. Based out of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, Clayton is the National Campaigner with the Defenders of the Land-Idle No More campaign known as Sovereignty Summer and the co-director of the Indigenous Tar Sands Campaign of the Polaris Institute. Follow him on Twitter @CreeClayton.

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This memorial marked every American killed by guns since the Newtown, Conn., school shootings—3,300 as of April 11, the day Sojourners set up the makeshift graveyard in Washington, D.C. as Congress was debating gun control legislation. Photo by John Sonderman.

Jim Wallis surprises people. He’s very much the evangelical pastor, with infectious warmth and an enthusiasm for preaching. But the founder and editor of Sojourners magazine is not out to convert people. He takes the teachings of Jesus seriously, challenging Christians to think first of justice for the poor and oppressed and to worry less about abortion and gay marriage. An inclusive “common good” is the core idea of his new book, On God’s Side: What Religion Forgets and Politics Hasn’t Learned About Serving the Common Good.

For Wallis, doing this takes more than talk. He stands with people losing their homes to foreclosure and those opposing the Keystone pipeline—he’s been arrested nearly two dozen times. He’s served as an adviser to President Obama and appeared on Jon Stewart’s “The Daily Show,” where he called giant Wall Street executive pay packages “a sin of Biblical proportions.”

Sarah van Gelder: This week started out with the bombing in Boston. How can faith communities respond to violence that kills civilians like this bombing but also like the drone strikes that are being carried out by the U.S. government?

Jim Wallis.

Jim Wallis: Boston has such stark contrasts. You had people who deliberately planted explosives to hurt and maim people, which is so destructive of the common good. At the same time, you had people rushing toward the blast, at risk to themselves, to help people who had been hurt, which is a heroic example of serving the common good. So, both things were present at the same time.
On the one hand, terrorists want to destroy the trust we have in our society and to create fear. At the same time, others are saying we can engage around our differences and have civil discourse and find common ground, and even find forgiveness and love for those with whom we disagree.

A few days ago, I was in Birmingham speaking, along with Representative John Lewis, at the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” Here was a room full of national church leaders who, after 50 years, were responding to King’s Birmingham letter. John and I opened the symposium, and we talked about the grievances King experienced: the brutal discrimination in Birmingham, Bull Connor firehosing children and siccing dogs on demonstrators, King thrown in jail. And eight moderate clergy blamed King and the civil rights movement for causing the trouble!

That’s a real grievance, and yet King’s response to those clergy is classic. It’s just and reasonable; it treats them with respect and love. And today, nobody remembers those eight clergy members. People remember King.

van Gelder: Let me follow up on the question of American drone strikes, because this is having an impact on the international common good—we’re talking about violence that’s killing civilians in the name of keeping the American people secure.

What's going to make us safer? What's going to build relationships? What's going to win the hearts and minds of people in Pakistan who had nothing to do with 9/11 but know about drones?

Wallis: On the one hand, the Obama administration is trying to move away from wars of occupation, which don’t work and don’t make us safe but do recruit more terrorists. The drone policy, allegedly, is an alternative to that, but it’s really spun out of control; there’s no clear framework or rules or procedures, and the loss of innocent lives is recruiting terrorists in Pakistan.
I tell a story in the book that seems unrelated but is very related. In a suburb of Memphis, Tenn., Heartsong Church, an evangelical Methodist church, learned that an Islamic cultural center was coming to their neighborhood. So Steve Stone, the pastor, puts out a big sign on the front lawn of the church: “Welcome Memphis Islamic Center.”

The Muslims were astonished. A couple of days later, they came to the church and they said, “Are you the pastor?” He says, “Yes.” They say, “We were hoping to be ignored, and you welcomed us. Why?”

“Jesus says we should welcome our neighbors, and we hear you’re going to be our neighbors, so welcome, neighbors! And we don’t know much about Islam, but we’d like to learn.”

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And before long, the church pork barbecue is serving halal meat, and the kids are playing with each other, and the adults are tutoring inner-city kids and feeding the homeless together. On CNN, the imam and the pastor are featured guests, and they clearly respect each other, and you can tell they have real affection for each other.

So I call Steve, and I was so pleased about this and so proud of him, and he said, “Can I tell you about a call I had last night?”

And I said, “Sure.”

“I got a call from Pakistan,” where we do drone strikes. Actually from Kashmir, Pakistan. Perhaps the most conflicted area of Pakistan. A room full of Muslim men, who said, “Is this Pastor Stone?” “Yes.” “We saw the segment on CNN.” And the voice said, “There was silence for a long time.

Finally one of us said, ‘I think God may be speaking to us through this man.’ And another one who can’t speak English, but I’ll speak for him, he went up to the little church near our mosque, and with his Muslim hands, he cleaned it, outside and inside, scrubbed it. Cleaned the church.”
“Now we’re all back, here in the room, and we called you to tell you, Pastor, tell your congregation, we don’t hate you. We love you. And because of what you did, for the rest of our lives, we’re going to take care of that little church.”

Now, which works better, that or drones? What’s going to make us safer? What’s going to build relationships? What’s going to win the hearts and minds of people in Pakistan, who had nothing to do with 9/11 but know about drones?

I want to commend this administration for moving us away from wars of occupation. But the drone policy isn’t the alternative. We’re hurting too many people.

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van Gelder: There’s a lot of emphasis on poverty in your book. I know that has a very solid theological foundation, but perhaps not one that is widely shared across the Christian faith. So I’m wondering if you can talk about the different ways people come at that question, and also about the statement of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.: “True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar ... it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.”

Wallis: King is right; this is about justice.

I realized we'd lost something very foundational, the ancient idea called the common good. ... This idea is in all of our religious traditions, but it's also in our secular democratic traditions.

Too many people are hauling drowning people out of the river—which is a good thing to do—but not sending somebody upstream to find out who or what’s throwing them in. A lot of people are still trying to work with the symptoms and the victims—which is wonderful and compassionate—but now we need to look at the causes.

I was at World Vision yesterday, and I said, I’m hearing you say, “Don’t just give someone a fish, teach them how to fish.” I agree with that. Here’s another question: Who owns the pond? And who is controlling what’s happening to the fish, the ecosystem, and the water?

A lot of young people care about human trafficking. It’s not just happening in Cambodia, it’s happening in Seattle, in Portland, everywhere. There are more sexual slaves today, women and children, than there were slaves when William Wilberforce worked to end slavery 200 years ago.
I’m for freeing women and children from the brothels and helping them start micro-enterprises. But who is laundering the money? What politicians are behind this? What businesspeople are profiting from it?

So the justice question is fundamental, and the good news is a whole new generation of Christians, even evangelical Christians, is asking the justice question.

A year and a half ago was when we met with the president and his team during the debt ceiling crisis to talk about what was going to be cut. We had a pretty broad group: Roman Catholic Bishops, the Salvation Army, Sojourners, Bread for the World, of course, but also the National Association of Evangelicals.

The Catholic bishop says, “Mr. President, the biblical text that brings us here does not say ‘As you’ve done to the middle class, you’ve done to me.’” This is Matthew 25. “It says, ‘As you’ve done to the least of these, you’ve done to me.’”

The president said, “I know that text.”

So I said, “I think you guys aren’t going to reach agreement, and we’re going to have a sequester. You’ve got to protect low income people from the sequester.”

We debated for an hour. The White House wouldn’t commit to it. An hour later they did. We also met with Rep. John Boehner and Rep. Paul Ryan. They said, “If it happens, we won’t block it.” And that’s how with $2 trillion in cuts, so far, SNAP and Medicaid are protected.
In the Bible, God is a god of justice and not of charity.

This week, with 90 percent of the American people supporting background checks, the Senate voted down a common-sense gun regulation. And people in the audience at my talk last night were just sickened, shocked, feeling democracy had been thwarted.

But the same day, eight senators introduced a comprehensive immigration reform bill, which is going to pass, but only because of pressure from the outside.

Yesterday we had a big gathering in D.C. of the Evangelical Immigration Table. NPR did a story about it this morning. Sojourners and Southern Baptists are together supporting immigration reform.

van Gelder: The way I understood this change in the immigration debate is that it shifted dramatically after the election when Hispanics swung the vote.

Wallis: Right, but the Evangelical Immigration Table had formed two years earlier. So both factors are very real.

van Gelder: We’ve talked a little bit about polarized politics, and I think we’re all feeling the cultural fallout and also the political fallout of having a gridlocked federal government. How do we get beyond that polarization? How do we create a higher ground that includes people of divergent faiths and that also includes those who are not people of faith?

Wallis: I took the first three months of the election year as a sabbatical to write this book, with a discipline not to write or speak or do anything on politics for three months.

I got up early, and I’d have some quiet time, exercise, and then I’d read and think and write all day. And at night I’d watch the news, and the more I watched, the more depressing it seemed. As you say, the polarization, paralysis, the vitriol, the anger, the fear, even hatred, and the shallowness of media politics—I realized we’d lost something very foundational, the ancient idea called the common good.

We can find common ground for the common good in the Golden Rule—treat others the way you want to be treated. This idea is in all of our religious traditions, but it’s also in our secular democratic traditions.

van Gelder: Jim, I didn’t read your entire book, but I read a lot of it, and I only found one reference to climate change. The science is clear: Climate change could not only upend the lives of other species but also the human species and especially the most vulnerable people on the planet.

Wallis: We have a major campaign at Sojourners on climate change; we just did a big retreat for evangelical environmentalists. Bill McKibben asked me to speak at the Keystone Pipeline rally at the White House. He told me to try to look religious; I was the only person there with a robe, and I could tell by people’s faces that they were suspicious. It was hilarious! But once I started talking, they lit up.

When people of faith say and do the things that our faith says we should say and do, it surprises people and it attracts them.

We have an economy I call the uneconomy. It’s unfair, unstable, unsustainable, and it’s making people unhappy.

The book talks about the new social covenant we’re putting out around the world, which has three values: human dignity, common good, and stewardship. If we just look at quarterly profit-and-loss statements for shareholders, we’re in serious trouble. As indigenous people say, you evaluate decisions today by their impact on the seventh generation out.

van Gelder: It seems to me that the climate denial movement has recruited a portion of the religious community that distrusts scientists and, in particular, climate science. How do we bridge that gap when we have so little time?

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Wallis: Well the good news is, it looks like the National Association of Evangelicals, the biggest evangelical group, has come out in favor of creation care and caring about climate change. So we’re winning, even on the evangelical side. The climate change deniers, the anti-science people, are a force on the Right for sure, but they’re losing their own kids. When I am on the road, the children of famous religious-right people come and talk to me at night—they don’t agree with their parents.

So I think we’re winning this generational battle, but as you point out, we don’t have decades and decades, so that’s a real challenge.

van Gelder: If you could suggest one thing to a YES! reader that they could do to reach out to people who are ideologically very different than they are, what would you say?

Wallis: The first thing I would say to a YES! reader is, religion has no monopoly on morality. We need all of us in this conversation. I want to speak to the genuine fears that secular activists may have of religious communities, because there have been people wanting to impose their religious agenda on the country using political power.

I fought my whole life against religious fundamentalists, but there also are secular fundamentalists who don’t want people of faith around, and who can be as narrow as the religious fundamentalists.

So let’s talk about a common ground for the common good, including people of faith, people who are spiritual but not religious, or secular but with moral sensibilities. I want to get over our fear of each other and embrace each other’s best moral values and find where we can work together.

Sarah van Gelder wrote this article for Love and the Apocalypse, the Summer 2013 issue of YES! Magazine. Sarah is co-founder and executive editor of YES!

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A protest against U.S. drones that target Pakistanis. Hong Kong, 2012. Photo by Yu Ping.

This article originally appeared in Waging Nonviolence

Two decades from now, social commentators may very well decide, with hindsight, that 2013 was a historic turning point. Humanity has an urgent choice to make about many monumental crises—including climate change, economic inequality, democracy for sale and resource wars—and opportunities.

One of the great decisions we face is about drones. This train is rapidly leaving the station, and it doesn’t take a crystal ball to see where it’s headed. In two decades it will likely be moot, but now we can still get in front of this locomotive. There is still time to imagine—and create—another future.

Part of reinventing the future hinges on the present’s anti-drone movement. In a few short years this effort has grown dramatically—even as the magnitude of the drone era has only gradually begun to sink in. With this growth comes the question: What is the ask? It is not enough to challenge this new technological leap. We must find a path to a world where these weapons are taboo.

Some of us have in mind a global treaty banning drones. An anti-drones treaty, if it becomes a reality, will likely be rooted in the emergent international movement against drones.

At the World Social Forum in Tunisia that took place this past March, an anti-drones workshop attended by participants from 15 nations decided to form a global anti-drones network. There is also talk about a global summit on anti-drones organizing in Britain at the end of November, where there is an increasingly vigorous movement led by the Drones Campaign Network and others. In the United States, this organizing is being advanced by Code Pink, Drones Watch, Know Drones, and the Network to Stop Drone Surveillance and Warfare, which helped sponsor a recent convergence in Syracuse, N.Y., and nationwide nonviolent actions against drones this past April.

When I was the national coordinator of an organization working to end the U.S. wars in Central America in the late 1980s, I got an impassioned letter from an activist in Louisiana arguing for a campaign focused on stopping the production of anti-personnel landmines being made in her state. The missive detailed the worldwide destruction these explosive devices were wreaking and urged that a concerted effort be launched to make them a thing of the past.

The Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty has been signed by 159 nations, including the United States, which exploded on average one nuclear bomb in the Nevada desert every week and a half for 40 years.

While we lent some support to this cry for help, it was not until 1991 that another Central America peace activist, Jody Williams, activated a bold and comprehensive plan to do something about landmines. Hired by the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation to coordinate a new effort to ban the devices worldwide, Williams worked without an office or staff to stitch together a global movement that led to the promulgation of the Mine Ban Treaty in 1997, which has now been signed by 161 nations. Some of the globe’s heavy hitters have refused to sign—including the United States, China, and Russia—but that’s why Williams and the effort she co-founded, The International Campaign to Ban Landmines, keep at it.

Even without universal compliance the treaty has made a difference. As the ICBL website reports, parties to the Mine Ban Treaty “must not use, develop, produce, acquire, stockpile, retain or transfer antipersonnel mines… Only a handful of states (not party to the treaty) and non-state armed groups continue to use antipersonnel landmines… Trade has come to a virtual halt.”

The Mine Ban Treaty is only one of numerous international agreements that have been steadily erecting the global armature of peace, justice and sustainability. Though we have far to go (as I am reminded by my students when we study the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, one of the greatest documents of this kind, whose 30 articles are violated daily), these initiatives commit states to steer clear of behavior that a global consensus has repudiated.

Treaties matter. They establish universal obligations. They signal the critical importance of the issue at hand.

Sometimes signatories ignore their commitments—Article VI of the 1970 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which obligates nations possessing nuclear weapons to achieve nuclear disarmament, comes to mind. But sometimes they stand by them. The Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, for example, has been signed by 159 nations since 1996 who have abided by it, including the United States, which exploded on average one nuclear bomb in the Nevada desert every week and a half for 40 years. Though the CTBT has yet to go fully into force (and though the U.S. Senate refuses to ratify it), most of the world operates as if this is the way we will be now.

In the end, that’s the ultimate power of international treaties. With few substantial options available to enforce them, international covenants rely on naming—and making durably plausible—a set of assumptions about how we will act and not act. The longer they exist, the stronger they resemble reality: as if can, at times, become is.

Treaties matter. They establish universal obligations. They signal the critical importance of the issue at hand. And they help build and reinforce a global constituency for yet another plank in the long-term construction of a worldwide culture of peace with justice.

The stepping stones that Jody Williams and others followed in establishing the International Mines Treaty might illuminate the roadmap to an anti-drones treaty. In the first several years of her work, Williams focused on convincing more than 1,000 non-governmental organizations from over 60 countries to support the campaign.

When a 1995 conference reviewing a limited convention on controlling landmines failed to make meaningful changes, momentum accelerated for an outright ban. At the end of the review conference, 40 nations said they supported an outright ban and began working with NGOs on this. The turning point was a meeting in Ottawa, Canada when 50 governments and 24 observers met.

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Over the next year, the treaty was developed between governments and NGOs, including the ICBL, which played a major role in the drafting process. Drafted by Austria, the Mine Ban Treaty was adopted in Oslo, Norway in September 1997 and signed by 122 states in Ottawa in December 1997. It entered into force less than two years later. Both the ICBL and Jody Williams were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1997.

This smooth timeline only begins to hint at everything this campaign entailed. The power of this campaign was rooted in the countless actions, strategic partnerships, and organizational projects that made the Mine Ban Treaty a reality.

While the particulars will no doubt be different, an anti-drones treaty will similarly need a concerted array of local and international movement-building efforts to help illuminate a fundamentally new course and to weld together a global consensus for pursuing it.

Ken Butigan originally wrote this article for Waging Nonviolence. It is reposted here with permission.

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International Hydropower Association president Richard Taylor addresses indigenous protesters. Photo by Save Rivers Network.

Richard Taylor, the president of the International Hydropower Association, left the air-conditioned interior of the Borneo Convention Center on Wednesday to face a crowd of more than 300 indigenous people. The protesters had traveled to Kuching, the capital city of the Malaysian state of Sarawak, from villages far in the state’s interior that will soon be underwater if a series of proposed hydroelectric dams is built. They had traveled many miles by boat and by bus to protest at the association’s biannual conference, which promotes the construction of dams around the world—including here in Borneo where one of the world’s largest dam projects is in the works.

“We are talking about the end of this race,” Kallang said. “They will lose their culture, way of life, and language.”

Taylor took a microphone and told the crowd that protests were not the right way to get their message out. The hydropower association wanted to help them, he said, and if the villagers didn’t like the dams, then they should talk to the government and to the construction companies and work out an agreement.

The people were not convinced, says Brihannala Morgan of the nonprofit Borneo Project, who described the villagers’ response as follows: “We’ve tried talking to you so many times, and you haven’t listened. This is our last resort.”

The Malaysian state of Sarawak spans much of the northern coast of Borneo—a Southeast Asian island twice the size of Germany that is one of the most biodiverse places on Earth. Orangutans climb through its trees, seven different species of hornbills scatter its seeds, and rare cloud leopards prowl its forests.

That diversity isn't limited to plants and animals. About 40 indigenous ethnic groups live in Sarawak’s rainforests, according to MinorityVoices.org. Most are subsistence farmers who also grow cash crops to buy commodities like clothing and sugar, says Peter Kallang, a full-time organizer with the Save Rivers Network, which advocates for the indigenous people of Sarawak. Other groups are even more isolated from the modern world, and continue a nomadic life and hunting and gathering.

The dams would flood areas that add up to about twice the size of Los Angeles.

But over the past several decades, aggressive logging and development has disrupted what remains of the indigenous way of life here. Kallang says that only 5 percent of the Sarawak’s original forests remain undisturbed. The rest has either been thinned out, or clear-cut and converted into palm oil plantations or industrial tree farms harvested regularly for the production of paper. Indigenous peoples have fewer and fewer acres of land on which to live in their traditional way.

On top of that deforestation, the government of Sarawak now plans a series of “megadams” that are part of what it calls the Sarawak Corridor of Renewable Energy, or SCORE. The project would involve building between nine and 12 hydroelectric dams, which would generate about 20,000 megawatts of power, according to the Yale Environment Review. The dams would flood areas that add up to about 2,300 square kilometers, according to a study of Sarawak Energy’s own numbers conducted by the Swiss nonprofit the Bruno Manser Fund—an area about twice the size of Los Angeles. While it’s difficult to quantify the exact number of people that will be displaced, the same study concludes that 235 settlements will be affected.

Spirits were high among indigenous protesters who traveled to Kuching to voice their opposition to the SCORE dams. Photo by Save Rivers Network.

“They're going to build these dams, flood this area, and force the natives out of the little land they have left,” Kallang told YES! by Skype. “We are talking about the end of this race. They will lose their culture, way of life, and language.”

Importantly, no customers currently exist for that electricity, Morgan adds. Instead, the plan is to build the dams first and then hope to attract industries, such as aluminum smelters, to the area later through promises of cheap power.

But the story may not have to end that way. In the past, the government has been able to win the agreement of indigenous people through promises and cash and new homes. That’s what happened in 1998, when about 10,000 people were resettled to make room for the Bakun Dam—currently the largest dam in Asia outside of China—which left their villages underwater. After resettlement, many reported that they had received less land than they were promised, according to the hydropower watchdog group International Rivers. And in many cases their new lands were not appropriate for farming.

Kallang says he expects similar treatment for people resettled for the new dams. “Probably they'll be put in the center of palm oil plantations that belong to big companies in Malaysia,” he says. “The government expects these people to work in these plantations.”

That fear has led Sarawak’s indigenous people to organize themselves in a new way. Formed in October 2011, the Save Rivers Network is a coalition that includes hundreds of local villages—including ones from far-flung areas of the country’s interior—as well as local nonprofit organizations.

It’s “unprecedented” for the indigenous people of Sarawak to work together on a political project of this kind, according to Brihannala Morgan.

Organizing in a Corrupt State

Every organizer contacted for this story mentioned the unique challenges posed by the regime of Chief Minister Abdul Taib Mahmud, who has ruled Sarawak since 1981. Environmental organizations have long considered his government to be corrupt, especially when it comes to the treatment of forests and land.

Herbertson adds that this work is not just about the dams, but about expanding the rights of Sarawak’s indigenous people more generally.

In 2011, a coalition of groups and individuals including Greenpeace and the Rainforest Information Centre, signed a letter to the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission calling for the arrest of Chief Minister Taib, eight of his siblings, and four of his children. The letter accuses Taib of “systematically and unduly favoring a number of family-linked companies by awarding them highly profitable untendered public contracts” and “hundreds of thousands of hectares of timber or plantation concessions.”

And it’s not just tree huggers who have a problem with Taib’s approach to the management of land in Sarawak. Wikileaks files reveal that representatives from the U.S. embassy in Malaysia wrote in 2006 that “Taib and his relatives are widely thought to extract a percentage from most major commercial contracts—including those for logging—awarded in the state.”

In March of 2013, the nonprofit group Global Witness posted a video on YouTube called “Inside Malaysia’s Shadow State,” in which researchers went undercover and posed as investors wishing to purchase land in Sarawak. With a hidden video camera, they captured representatives of Taib’s government appearing to suggest that the undercover researchers engage in bribery and tax evasion. The regime responded by saying that the comments were taken out of context.

Reaching Out to the Capital and Beyond

The revelations contained in the video came as no surprise to Peter Kallang, who has little faith in the local regime. So he turned to Malaysia’s federal government instead. While those efforts have resulted in no new policies or improved federal oversight, the campaign did manage to bind Sarawak’s indigenous people into a network capable of acting quickly to organize events like the one that took place on Wednesday.

In 2010, Kallang hand-delivered a memorandum about indigenous concerns about the SCORE dams to the Prime Minister of Malaysia, but says he received no response. In October of 2012, representatives of Save Rivers Network again traveled to Kuala Lumpur, the capital city of Malaysia, to deliver a memorandum. Kallang says that members of the opposition party listened to his group’s concerns, while members of the ruling party ignored their invitations.

More recently, Kallang and other organizers with the network traveled by boat to the remote region where the Baram Dam is slated to be built. The Baram Dam is the second in the SCORE project and would require the resettlement of between 6,000 and 8,000 people, according to Sarawak Energy, the state-owned company that heads up the construction of dam projects in the state. The organizers visited every village that the dam would affect, informing the residents about the plan and collecting signatures from those who opposed the project. After adding those signatures to others he’d been gathering since 2010, Kallang says, he had 10,000 signatures from indigenous people opposed to the SCORE dams. He sent them to the federal government and again received no reply.

Kirk Herbertson, a lawyer who works with International Rivers, says that the funders of the project—which is expected to cost $105 billion by 2030—have been equally unresponsive to international criticism. Sarawak Energy has operated without transparency, Herbertson says, and has not made its environmental impact statements public before construction has begun. He says that criticism over the lack of transparency might be more of an obstacle if SCORE was being funded by multinational banks such as the World Bank or even Citigroup. “But there’s no real accountability for the investors that are investing in this,” Herbertson says, such as the Export-Import Bank of China.

Despite all of these challenges, Kallang says he remains hopeful. International firms who assist with the funding, design, and construction of the SCORE dams do not want to face accusations of involvement in violations of human rights, and Kallang has been more successful at working that angle. When an Australian company called Hydro Tasmania provided design assistance for the Baram Dam, members of the Save Rivers Network traveled to Canberra to speak to members of Parliament about it. Shortly after that trip, the company downsized its operations in Sarawak from 12 staff members to only four, Kallang says.

Herbertson adds that this work is not just about the dams, but about expanding the rights of Sarawak’s indigenous people more generally. He says the Save Rivers Network is important because “it’s helping to raise the profile, both locally and internationally, about what these people are facing.”

That sounds a lot like what the organizers of Idle No More have been saying since the North American movement for indigenous rights got started in November of 2012. Both movements begin with indignation about energy extraction projects that threaten to deprive indigenous people of their land and livelihood, but end with a vision of a more sustainable future in which native people are more connected to one another, more aware of their shared interests, and better equipped to stand up for themselves in the courts, in the media, and in the streets.

James Trimarco wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. James is web editor at YES!.

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Melina Laboucan-Massimo stands next to logs from clearcuts at a proposed tar sands site north of Fort McMurray, northern Alberta, Canada. Photo by Jiri Rezac.

There’s a remote part of northern Alberta where the Lubicon Cree have lived, it is said, since time immemorial. The Cree called the vast, pine-covered region niyanan askiy, “our land.” When white settlers first carved up this country, they made treaties with most of its original inhabitants—but for reasons unclear, the Lubicon Cree were left out. Two hundred years later, the Lubicon’s right to their traditional territory is still unrecognized. In the last four decades, industry has tapped the vast resource wealth that lies deep beneath the pines; today, 2,600 oil and gas wells stretch to the horizon. This is tar sands country.

In 2012 testimony before the U.S. Congress, Lubicon Cree organizer Melina Laboucan-Massimo, then 30, described witnessing the devastation of her family’s ancestral land caused by one of the largest oil spills in Alberta’s history. “What I saw was a landscape forever changed by oil that had consumed a vast stretch of the traditional territory where my family had hunted, trapped, and picked berries and medicines for generations.”

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“When we’re at home, we feel really isolated,” says Laboucan-Massimo, who has spent her adult life defending her people’s land from an industry that has rendered it increasingly polluted and impoverished. The Lubicon are fighting a hard battle, but their story—of resource extraction, of poverty and isolation, and of enduring resistance—is one that echoes in indigenous communities around the world. Today, Laboucan-Massimo and others like her are vanguards of a network of indigenous movements that is increasingly global, relevant—and powerful.

This power manifests in movements like Idle No More, which swept Canada last December and ignited a wave of solidarity on nearly every continent. Laboucan-Massimo was amazed—and hopeful. Triggered initially by legislation that eroded treaty rights and removed protection for almost all of Canada’s rivers—clearing the way for unprecedented fossil fuel extraction—Idle No More drew thousands into the streets. In a curious blend of ancient and high-tech, images of indigenous protesters in traditional regalia popped up on news feeds all over the world.

A history of resistance

To outsiders, it might seem that Idle No More materialized spontaneously, that it sprang into being fully formed. It builds, however, on a long history of resistance to colonialism that began when Europeans first washed up on these shores. Now, armed with Twitter and Facebook, once-isolated movements from Canada to South America are exchanging knowledge, resources, and support like never before.

"When you destroy the earth, you destroy yourself,” says Melina Laboucan-Massimo. This is “the common thread in indigenous people all over the world.”

Idle No More is one of what Subcomandante Marcos, the masked prophet of the Mexican Zapatistas, called “pockets of resistance,” which are “as numerous as the forms of resistance themselves.” The Zapatistas are part of a wave of indigenous organizing that crested in South America in the 1990s, coinciding with the 500th anniversary of European conquest—most effectively in Bolivia, Ecuador, and Mexico. Certain threads connect what might otherwise be isolated uprisings: They’re largely nonviolent, structurally decentralized, they seek common cause with non-natives, and they are deeply, spiritually rooted in the land.

The connections among indigenous organizers have strengthened through both a shared colonial history and a shared threat—namely, the neoliberal economic policies of deregulation, privatization, and social spending cuts exemplified by the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the World Trade Organization. Indigenous organizers see these agreements as nothing more than the old colonial scramble for wealth at the expense of the natives. In a 1997 piece in Le Monde Diplomatique, Marcos called neoliberalism “the totalitarian extension of the logic of the finance markets to all aspects of life,” resulting in “the exclusion of all persons who are of no use to the new economy.” Many indigenous leaders charge that the policies implemented through organizations like the World Bank and the IMF prioritize corporations over communities and further concentrate power in the hands of a few.

Uprising in Ecuador

The mid-1990s saw a massive expansion of such policies—and with it, an expansion of resistance, particularly in countries with significant indigenous populations. In 1990, CONAIE, the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador, staged a massive, nonviolent levantamiento—an uprising—flooding the streets of Quito, blocking roads and effectively shutting down the country. Entire families walked for days to reach the capital to demand land rights, fair prices for agrarian goods, and recognition of Ecuador as a plurinational state, made up of multiple, equally legitimate nations. In the end it forced renegotiation of policy and created unprecedented indigenous representation in government; many hailed CONAIE’s success as a model for organizing everywhere.

CONAIE’s slogan, “Nothing just for Indians,” invited participation from non-indigenous allies around larger questions of inequality and political representation, creating a political space that was big and inclusive enough for everyone. Dr. Maria Elena Garcia, who studies these movements at the University of Washington, says that non-indigenous support has been “crucial” for success across the board. In the case of CONAIE, she says, there came a tipping point when “most Ecuadorians … said, ‘Enough. This organization is speaking for us.’”

Idle No More clearly exists in the Zapatista tradition, but it goes further in incorporating the language of climate justice. In December as many as 50,000 masked Mayan Zapatistas marched into cities across Chiapas. Differing from the 1994 armed indigenous uprising, this one was done in complete silence.

The Zapatista Army

Meanwhile, in Mexico, the Zapatista movement was busy building a different kind of revolution. On January 1, 1994, the Zapatista Army took its place on the international stage. It was day one of NAFTA, which Subcomandante Marcos called “a death sentence to the indigenous ethnicities of Mexico.” More than any other movement, they linked local issues of cultural marginalization, racism, and inequality to global economic systems and prophesied a new movement of resistance. The media-savvy revolutionaries used their most potent weapon—words—and the still-new Internet to advocate a new world built on diversity as the basis for ecological and political survival. Transnational from the beginning, the Zapatistas made common cause with “pockets of resistance” everywhere.

Then, a curious change occurred: for nearly 10 years following their initial insurgency, the Zapatistas maintained a self-imposed silence. The world heard little from Marcos, but the autonomous communities in Chiapas were very much alive. They had turned inward, building independent governments, schools, and clinics. As journalist and author Naomi Klein observed, “These free spaces, born of reclaimed land, communal agriculture, resistance to privatization, will eventually create counter-powers to the state simply by existing as alternatives.” Embodying, here and now, the society they seek to create is a powerful manifesto; for those who cared to listen, their silence spoke volumes.

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Victory in Bolivia

Most of these movements have used nonviolent tactics, including blockades, occupations of public space, and mass marches—combined with traditional political work—to varying degrees of success. In Bolivia these tactics yielded an extraordinary outcome: the election of Evo Morales, in 2005, as Bolivia’s first indigenous head of state.

Five years later, Morales convened 30,000 international delegates for the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth. A response to the repeated failure of international climate negotiations, the gathering was rooted in an indigenous worldview that recognized Mother Earth as a living being, entitled to her own inalienable rights.

The resulting declaration placed blame unequivocally on the capitalist system that has “imposed on us a logic of competition, progress, and limitless growth.” This unrestrained growth, the declaration says, transforms “everything into commodities: water, earth, the human genome, ancestral cultures, biodiversity, justice, ethics, the rights of peoples, and life itself.” Significantly, the declaration also extended the analysis of colonialism to include climate change—calling for “decolonization of the atmosphere”—but it rejected market-based solutions like carbon trading. It’s a holistic analysis that links colonialism, climate change, and capital, a manifesto for what has come to be called “climate justice.”

Idle No More

Fast forward to December 2012, and two things happened: The Zapatistas staged simultaneous marches in five cities, marking a resurgence of their public activism. Anywhere from 10,000–50,000 masked marchers filled the streets in complete silence. The march was timed to coincide with the end of the Mayan calendar—and the beginning of a new, more hopeful era—and demonstrated the Zapatistas’ commitment to the indigenous cosmology of their ancestors.

That same month, a continent away, Idle No More emerged on the scene. While it began as a reaction to two specific bills in Parliament, it has gained strength and momentum in opposition to the network of proposed pipelines that will crisscross North America, pumping tar sands oil from Alberta to refineries and ports in Canada and the U.S. These pipelines will cross national, tribal, state, and ethnic boundaries and raise a multitude of issues—including water quality, land rights, and climate change. The campaign to stop their construction is already unifying natives and non-natives in unprecedented ways.

Dr. Garcia, whose own ancestors are indigenous, believes that indigenous movements offer something vital: hope, and what she calls “the importance of the imaginary. Of imagining a different world—imagining a different way of being in the world.”

“We’re a land-based people, but it goes further than that. It’s a worldview. When you destroy the earth, you destroy yourself,” says Melina Laboucan-Massimo. This is “the common thread in indigenous people all over the world.”

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It is this thread that goes to the heart of our global ecological crisis. While indigenous cultures differ widely from one another, what they collectively present is an alternative relationship—to the earth, to its resources, and to each other—a relationship based not on domination but on reciprocity. Any movement that seeks to create deep, lasting social change—to address not only climate change but endemic racism and social inequality—must confront our colonial identity and, by extension, this broken relationship.

Laboucan-Massimo has spent a great deal of time abroad, studying indigenous movements from Latin America to New Zealand and Australia, feeling the full weight of their shared history under colonialism. These days, though, she’s more likely to be on the road, educating, organizing, and building solidarity among natives and non-natives. It was understanding the connections between movements, she says, that gave her “all the more fervor to come back and continue to do the work here.”

Recently, she traveled from Alberta  to the National Mall in Washington, D.C., where she and her elders stood at the forefront of the largest climate change rally in history. And she’ll keep organizing, armed with a smartphone, supported by a growing network of allies from Idle No More and beyond, connected in every possible way to the rest of the world.

Kristin Moe wrote this article for Love and the Apocalypse, the Summer 2013 issue of YES! Magazine. Kristin is a writer, farmer, and graduate of the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies. She writes about climate justice, grassroots movements, and social change.

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How did American nuns move from the traditional confines of convent life to the social activism that has them under Vatican investigation for being too radical and feminist?  Blame (or credit) Vatican II in the early 1960s, which instructed Catholics to take their religion out into the world and make it relevant. According to Mary Fishman’s new documentary, Band of Sisters, American nuns eagerly took up the call to serve where there is greatest need. That work led them to seeing the causes, not just the symptoms, of injustice.

Going out into the world brought more than just a change from the black and white nun’s habit to ordinary clothing. There were intellectual, emotional, and spiritual transformations too, as the numerous sisters interviewed in the film explain. Many of the interviewees are old enough to have experienced the changes of role and attitude over the decades since Vatican II. Their testimony gives this film authenticity and gentle authority.

The work of Sisters Pat Murphy and JoAnn Persh is one example. Fishman shows them as they prepare to go out into a dark Chicago winter morning to hold a vigil outside an immigrant deportation center. They want the authorities to let them inside to bring support and comfort to the deportees. In successive scenes, we see that they eventually do get inside the center, even though it takes time, organized lobbying, and a change in state law. Their determined action achieves results.

The radicalizing effect of focusing on the physical world and the equality of all humans is most obvious in the scenes where we see nuns running an organic farm and environmental center, or presenting a cosmology that is as much indigenous as Genesis. No wonder they’re in trouble with the church’s patriarchy, even under a new pope. But you can’t put this genie back in the bottle—or the Sister of Mercy back in the cloister.

Valerie Schloredt wrote this article for Love and the Apocalypse, the Summer 2013 issue of YES! Magazine. Valerie is associate editor of YES!

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St. Paul, Minn, on May 13, 2013: Thousands of people gathered at the state capitol building during the Minnesota Senate debate on a same-sex marriage bill. The Minnesota Senate passed the bill by a vote of 37 to 30. Photo by Fibonacci Blue.

Last week, on the day the Minnesota House of Representatives passed the same-sex marriage bill, the Capitol rotunda was full of emotion: a middle-aged lesbian couple carried "Freedom to Marry" signs; a man with a baby on his shoulders wore a "Freedom to Marry" t-shirt; two young men waved rainbow flags together. Minnesotans are not known for their outspoken nature, but here they were: shouting, singing, and embracing the moment and one another as a hard-fought victory for social change neared.

Last November, voters in Minnesota were given a ballot initiative opportunity to amend our state’s constitution to ban same-sex marriage. This week, after the bill cleared the Senate, Minnesota made marriage legal for all.

I often find myself so embroiled in policy and politics that I fail to see the change that society is undergoing. Minnesota legalized gay marriage! This is big time stuff—for us, for the Midwest, and for society as a whole. Not only did we do it, but we did it with great speed. How did we travel so far in only six months?

“Vote No” transformed into “Vote Yes,” and somewhere between budget and tax debates emerged a bill seeking the authorization of marriage between any two persons—straight or gay.

We are the only state in the Midwest to have legalized same-sex marriage through legislation (Iowa did so through a Supreme Court decision in 2009); and we're only the 12th state in the United States to arrive at marriage equality. It is said that Illinois soon will follow suit. In the Midwest, we have watched this equality spread across the Northeast, hopeful that our time would come too.  Now, from Minneapolis to Embarrass, Minn. (yes, that's a place), all Minnesotans have the right to marry.

We're a politically vibrant state, with our own brand of politics. From the outside we have at times appeared unserious (see: Jesse Ventura, Michele Bachmann); but inside we are as serious about politics as we are about our Lutheran Churches and Hot Dish potlucks. We vote thoughtfully, and in great numbers—we've had the highest turnout in the country.  We are historically a blue state, but it’s a shade of blue that’s our own: We're equally willing to elect pragmatic conservative governors or send the first Muslim to the U.S. Congress.

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In the 2010 election, the Republican Party of Minnesota was carried into power with the national mid-term movement toward the Right. Minnesota Republicans won majorities in both the House and Senate for the first time in nearly 40 years.

In May, 2011, leadership passed a measure asking voters to amend our constitution with a definition of marriage as “only a union of one man and one woman.” Republicans put the issue to the people, confident that, like every state to precede us when deciding in a ballot measure, Minnesotans would block marriage equality efforts before they could even start.

The amendment failed. On the heels of a massive outpouring of support for a “Vote No” campaign organized by Minnesotans United for All Families, the amendment to ban gay marriage went down, and with it, the Republican majorities. Our ballots protected gays and lesbians from constitutional discrimination and returned control of Minnesota’s legislative chambers to the DFL.

With great change came great opportunity. And, perhaps ironically, the push for the failed constitutional amendment against gay marriage galvanized unprecedented passion and initiative in the movement for it.

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Now the marriage supporters were organized. “Vote No” quickly transformed into “Vote Yes,” and somewhere between budget and tax debates emerged State Senator Scott Dibble’s bill seeking the authorization of marriage between any two persons—straight or gay.

Success was never assured. Local media didn’t know which way the wind blew, with one local analyst telling KSTP, a local ABC affiliate, that “a bill legalizing gay marriage does not stand ‘prayer's chance’ of passing this legislative session.”  Governor Mark Dayton said he didn’t want social issues to distract other policy decisions, and Speaker Paul Thissen said he wouldn’t even think of a vote unless they could be assured the votes were there. Year one of our legislative biennium is a budget year, after all, and marriage policy is anything but budget.

But passionate support and vigorous campaigning brought marriage equality to the table anyway. Last Monday, the bill passed in the Senate, 37—30, and it was signed into law by Tuesday.

This story is unique to Minnesota, but the ending is not. Ours is one among an expanding landscape of victories. We are already the third state in the past four weeks—on the heels of Delaware and Rhode Island—to find our way here. And the list will continue to grow even as opponents continue efforts to slow the spread of equality.

But they’ll fail. The push for civil rights takes time, courage, and strength. If those rights are awarded to a few, they will soon be awarded to more. And they are not lightly taken back.

Christopher Zumski Finke wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization. Christopher is the Culture Editor at Hothouse Magazine. He has written for numerous publications in the past ten years in addition to his blog, The Third Ten Million Years, where he writes about politics, pop culture, and the environment. Christopher works in renewable energy policy at Wind on the Wires, a Midwest regional policy and advocacy organization. He lives in St. Paul, Minnesota, with his wife and son.

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Noam Gur holds the letter in which she refused conscription. Photo by Oren ziv/Activstills.

When the 19-year-old Israeli war resister Noam Gur attends weekly demonstrations against the occupation of Palestine, the soldiers who suppress the protestors—with tear gas, stun grenades, and occasionally live fire—aren’t just strangers in uniform. Among them are her former high school classmates, who have been conscripted into the Israeli army.

Gur was supposed to serve, too, but instead joined the shministim. This is a Hebrew term meaning high school students in their senior year, who face conscription into the army. But the word is also used to refer to students who publicly refuse conscription on ethical grounds.

“All my friends from high school are in the army,” Gur explains. “Now I see them at demos. It is really weird and complicated.”

With a shrug of her shoulders, Gur describes the process that led to her refusal of conscription. “I found out that what they taught me in school was different from this reality. I went to the West Bank to protests and saw the occupation. I started to realize I didn’t want to serve.”

She is one of many young Israelis who are saying no to the army.

Gur, who has cropped hair and a shy smile, was supposed to be a soldier before she was out of her teens, like most Israeli youth. But instead she served 20 days in prison for refusing orders. Now an anti-occupation activist who supports other young people questioning military service, she is one of many young Israelis who are saying no to the army. They are part of growing number of Israeli movements working to end the occupation from the inside.

Letters of resistance

To understand what it takes to become a shministi—the singular form of shiministim—it’s important to understand the powerful grip of the Israeli military on society. Israel’s occupation of Palestine and aggressive stance toward many of its neighbors requires a highly militarized society. The country devotes almost one fifth of its national budget to military spending, 18 percent of which is paid for by the United States. Israel’s military spending as a percentage of GDP is one of the highest in the world, and it boasts a larger military than any of its neighbors. The country maintains a stash of nuclear weapons and is the world's eighth largest arms exporter.

Meanwhile, children are prepared for compulsory service from an early age by constant military presence in educational settings, including “teacher soldiers” in some schools. Walking through Israeli cities and towns, one encounters streets filled with soldiers carrying M4 and M16 rifles, many of them in plain clothes.

“There is always a military background here,” Gur says.

The army makes it nearly impossible to get a discharge based on conscientious objector status.

While the Israeli army is preeminent in society, it is not invincible. Public draft resistance began in 1970, when a handful of students penned an open letter to then-Prime Minister Golda Meir, in which they explained their refusal to serve in territories seized and occupied in the 1967 war. In 1982, a group of army reservists refused to serve in the Lebanon War, founding the group Yesh Gvul, whose name means “there is a limit.” The movement of letter-writing and refusal by high school seniors grew during the early 2000s, prompting the military to crack down and sentence each of the five shministim from the class of 2002 to two years in prison.

By 2008, when almost 100 people signed public letters resisting conscription, prison terms for shministim had become standard. The army makes it nearly impossible to get a discharge based on conscientious objector status, and many shministim escape conscription only by claiming mental unfitness, often after serving multiple prison sentences. The 19-year-old shministi Nathan Blanc is currently serving his eighth consecutive prison term for refusing army service in protest of second-class rights for Palestinians.

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In addition to those who publicly resist, an unknown number engage in “gray resistance,” quietly applying for discharges on mental, physical, and religious grounds. As of 2008, about half of all potential conscripts did not enlist due to various exemptions, according to Israeli army officials.

Sahar Vardi, a shministi from the class of 2008, wants to encourage this type of resistance. She is a member of the Israeli feminist demilitarization group New Profile, which offers consultation and support to youth questioning military service. The organization reaches 2,000 people who are seeking to resist military service each year, she says.

Saying no to conscription and occupation

Gur, who grew up in Nahariya, a town just north of Haifa, had a sister in the border police in Gaza at the time of her refusal. Despite her family’s objection to her resistance, she penned her public letter in 2012. In it, she explained her unwillingness to serve in an army that has, she wrote, “been engaged in dominating another nation, in plundering and terrorizing a civilian population that is under its control.” After receiving two successive prison terms for refusing orders, she was finally released after claiming mental unfitness.

In a society where graduates are required to participate directly in military occupation at an early age, saying no can be a way of showing another path is possible.

The number of public shministim has been shrinking in recent years, with just three 12th graders, including Gur, publicly declaring their draft refusal in 2012. Yet Electronic Intifada reports that the number of resisters among the Druze, an ethnic minority from the country’s north, is on the rise, with Druze musician Omar Saad publicly refusing conscription last year. Furthermore, New Profile consultants say that the number of gray resisters continues to increase.

Regardless of its size, Israeli anti-occupation organizers insist that the tradition of refusing conscription remains a relevant force, in conjunction with other demilitarization efforts. “Breaking the consensus on occupation is important,” says Netta Mishley, a shministi from the class of 2009. “It allows people to feel more free speaking their minds.”

Gur, who also supports the Palestinian call for boycott, divestment, and sanction of Israel, says that that draft resistance is one tactic among many, and it is difficult to tell how effective it is. Nonetheless, she argues that refusal is important to encourage. In a society where graduates fresh out of high school are required to participate directly in military occupation at an early age, saying no can be a way of showing another path is possible, and retrieving one's humanity in the process.

Sarah Lazare wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas and practical actions. Sarah is a writer and organizer in U.S. anti-war and anti-militarist movements, and is a member of The Civilian-Soldier Alliance and War Times. She co-edited PM Press book About Face: Military Resisters Turn Against War, and her work has appeared in publications including The Nation, Truthout, and Al Jazeera English.

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A house relocated from South Dakota's Pine Ridge Indian Reservation stands in the National Mall in Washington, D.C. Photo by the author.

Last month, a new building joined the Washington Monument and the Capitol building on the National Mall. The small, run-down shack had previously housed 13 people, and it was brought to Washington, D.C., from the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota to raise awareness about the critical need for housing on reservations around the country.

"It's very difficult to get anybody to leave Washington to see it first-hand, and until you see it first-hand, it doesn't have the impact," explained Thomas Boesen, a Washington-based housing lobbyist who was at the April 17 demonstration.

At 2.8 million acres, Pine Ridge is one of the largest Indian reservations in the country. It's also one of the poorest. Housing is in such short supply at Pine Ridge that multiple families are forced to cram into small trailers, and as many as 18 people have been recorded living in a single home.

North Dakota Senator Heidi Heitkamp speaks with housing advocate Paul Iron Cloud. Photo by the author.

A group of 10 fair housing advocates from the Oglala Sioux tribe transported the house to the National Mall in a demonstration that was dubbed The Trail of Hope for Indian Housing. Throughout the day, curious tourists and student groups wandered by and snapped photos, and in the afternoon North Dakota Senator Heidi Heitkamp stopped by to show her support.

"This is not a way that we would ever expect grandmas and grandpas to live," Heitkamp told a small group of demonstrators standing in front of the house.

The house used in the demonstration was a small, 52-year-old home that had two bedrooms and one bathroom before it was deconstructed and reconfigured so that it could fit on a trailer. With torn screens and crumbling window frames, the small gray structure was the first home built with federal assistance on Pine Ridge. After remaining on display on the National Mall for one day, the group donated the house to the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian to be used in a future exhibit.

Red tape holds back the green

Indian reservations have some of the worst housing conditions in the United States, but not all tribes deal with the level of poverty and overcrowding seen on Pine Ridge. According to the Trail of Hope demonstrators, that’s partly because resources are generally not distributed among reservations according to need. The message that the Oglala Sioux brought to Washington is that more money needs to be allocated to the nation's poorest tribes, which don't have enough resources to meet their members’ basic needs.

Acquiring land isn't the problem on Pine Ridge; many families there already own property passed down from treaties. What they need is money to build houses. "We have three or four families living in one house," says Paul Iron Cloud, director of the Oglala Sioux Housing Authority. And those overcrowded living conditions affect everything from public health to education. "How do you think you could study with three families in one house?"

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Iron Cloud testified before nine senators on the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs on April 10 to discuss the barriers to housing development on Indian reservations. Housing funds are tied up in a tangle of red tape that forces reservation housing advocates to compete with other transportation and housing lobbies for money, he said. As a result, Indian housing is often overlooked.

The reconfigured house sits on its trailer on the National Mall. Photo by the author.

Nonprofit organizations and faith-based volunteer groups are increasingly stepping up on reservations to fill the void left by the federal government. One group that is working to improve housing conditions at Pine Ridge is the Oglala Sioux Tribe Partnership for Housing, a nonprofit organization that was founded in 1999 to help tribal members purchase homes. The Partnership helped to organize the Trail of Hope, and the group’s director, Emma "Pinky" Clifford, also sits on the board of directors of the tribe’s Housing Authority. In the 14 years since the Partnership was formed, Clifford says the group has helped more than 100 families to acquire homes.

But it’s never easy, and each home presents unique challenges. Clifford says she approaches construction and fundraising projects one house at a time, often using different strategies to finance each project. If an approach works, the organization will try to replicate it; if not, they’ll try something else.

As I left the National Mall, Clifford handed me a flyer for her latest project, a single-family home that she hopes to complete and deliver by July 2013. A solid foundation and parking pad are already in place, but nothing else. A lumber company from Maine is donating all the building materials, and others will be providing labor and appliances, but Clifford says she’s still trying to figure out how to add electrical, plumbing, and heating systems.

"We have hope," Paul Iron Cloud said, wearing a big black cowboy hat while sitting in front of the house as it stood on the National Mall. "Bringing this house to Washington, hopefully that will show Congress and the people that there is light at the end of the tunnel."

Mark Andrew Boyer wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas and practical actions. Mark is a photographer and writer based in the San Francisco Bay Area. His work has appeared in GOOD, Inhabitat, and Mindful Metropolis.

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A woman mourns at a vigil for a six members of the Sikh community who were fatally shot in Oak Creek, Wisconsin. Photo by LJLphotography.

The aftermath of the Boston bombings reminded me of 9/11—but not for the reasons you might think.

South Asian, Arab, and Muslim communities mourned along with our fellow Americans after explosions rocked the finish line in Boston. But we also held our breath for a second attack—not one caused by bombs, but by assumptions and accusations. And, at the same time, we looked around and wondered what, if anything, America had learned in the decade since 9/11.

The American people have subtly matured in their thinking about immigration and the trade-off between liberty and security.

Shortly after the Boston bombings, a tow truck driver at a Seattle gas station asked me where I was from. I’ve been a U.S. citizen for 13 years, but he seemed to be asking something unrelated to my place of residence. I told him I was born in India. His next question was “Did you hear about the bombings?”

Why that progression? Why bring up the bombings immediately after learning this? Was he questioning my allegiances, making some unconscious connection between my dark skin, India, and people who might bomb our nation?

I shrugged it off but was immediately reminded of something that happened at a gas station in Mesa, Ariz., shortly after 9/11. A deranged gunman shot at a Sikh man, in part because of his turban and beard, shouting "I stand for America all the way."

In the wake of 9/11, hate crimes hit Arab, Muslim, and South Asian communities like a barrage of shrapnel. After Boston, there were fewer hate crimes, but still too many—enough to strike us all with fear and cause potentially lasting psychological damage. At the same time, the situation spoke of a subtle maturation of the American people in their thinking about immigration and the trade-off between liberty and security.

Just hours after the Boston explosions, Abdullah Faruque, a Bangladeshi brought up in New York City, was beaten up in the Bronx, called a “f--kin’ Arab,” and left unconscious with a dislocated shoulder. Two days later, Heba Abolaban, a Palestinian physician who emigrated from Syria, was out with her baby when she was punched in the face by a man who yelled expletives at her and accused her of being a terrorist. And though fewer incidents took place than did 12 years ago (at least as reported thus far), the sting of prejudice-induced hate felt just as sharp and chilling. Yet again, many communities were immediately deemed suspicious solely because of their race or creed.

Had the FBI relied on the same biases that plagued the media and Internet, the true perpetrators would still be unknown.

Just after 9/11, I started Hate Free Zone Washington, one of many organizations across the United States working to combat hate crimes against Arab, Muslim, and South Asian communities in the United States. Within weeks, that work grew into fighting government policies and practices that gave an official sanction to bias and discrimination, like secret detentions and racial profiling.

Thanks to a decade of groundwork, our communities were better prepared this time—they were ready to coordinate with law enforcement to share concerns and information quickly and efficiently. President Obama and even the FBI warned the public against jumping to any conclusions about the ethnicity of the suspects. And yet the assumptions still bubbled up through the cracks of America’s consciousness.

Was the media to blame? The New York Post falsely reported that a Saudi man was a suspect in custody. They went on to splash pictures of innocent bystanders—high school athlete Salah Barhoum and his coach—whose only crime was watching the marathon. CNN incorrectly reported that an arrest had been made of a “dark-skinned male.” Internet “detectives” jumped on this race-driven bandwagon with pictures of alleged suspects, most of them with dark skin.

Had the FBI relied on the same biases that plagued the media and Internet, the true perpetrators would still be unknown. Apart from being discriminatory, those assumptions were downright wrong.

No amount of correction after the fact fixes the damage to real people and communities. Salah Barhoum remains afraid to leave his house because he fears for his safety. The Saudi national whose apartment was raided simply because he was a dark man running from the blasts has to live with the experience of prejudice. And all dark-skinned people have to fear whether they can ever be simple bystanders instead of suspects. Are only white people allowed to watch marathons, take pictures of landmarks, or carry backpacks without being suspects?

But in the end, I am most inspired—as I was after 9/11—by ordinary people who tried to make a difference by helping others and by changing the tone of the conversation. Bystanders carried bleeding victims away from the bombings. Nurses and doctors who were part of the watching crowd rushed forward to help, and one man in a cowboy hat leaped over a fence in order to rescue some of the wounded. Non-immigrant advocates began immediately circulating messages on Listservs, warning others not to discriminate or jump to conclusions and expressing solidarity with immigrant communities who might be attacked.

I’m also cautiously hopeful about the difference in how our government has behaved. While there were attempts by some senators to push for the suspect to be tried as an enemy combatant, these efforts were not successful. We seemed to have learned that swerving to the extreme by giving up due process on some cases ultimately hurts all of us. This time, there were no secret detentions or deportations. This time, the alleged perpetrator will be tried in civilian court. Meanwhile, attempts to derail the immigration reform bill—while not finished by any means—have failed so far. Many senators on both sides of the aisle seem to understand that good policies that protect both liberty and security are our best insurance against hateful acts.

Today, polls say that Americans are less likely to trade civil liberties for security. That may be because they understand that absolute security is impossible and that the sacrifices to our freedoms are too great. It may also be because we’ve learned that our communities and our country are resilient and filled with a hope that continues to trickle through even the darkest of times.

Perhaps we really are learning—though more slowly than we’d like—the lesson that is as true today as it was twelve years ago: when fear wins, America loses. And when we stand up together, as one community bound by the same hopes, dreams, and fears, we take one step forward toward that more perfect union.

Pramila Jayapal is the Distinguished Taconic Fellow at the Center for Community Change and a Distinguished Fellow at the University of Washington Law School. She is also the founder and former Executive Director of OneAmerica, Follow her on Twitter @pramilaj.

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Eric LeCompte is the executive director of the Jubilee USA Network.

Last October, soldiers from the West African nation of Ghana boarded an Argentine naval ship called the Libertad. They overtook the crew and brought the ship to port in the town of Tema. This was not an act of piracy, at least not in the sense we normally understand it. The detaining of the Libertad took place after hedge fund NML Capital convinced a Ghanaian court that the ship, which was sailing in Ghanaian jurisdiction, should be held ransom for a debt the hedge funds claimed Argentina owed them.

The saga began in 2001, when Argentina was thrown into economic crisis and defaulted on its loans. Hedge funds swooped in and bought Argentine debt for almost nothing and circled until the country was in recovery to collect the debt in full.

The case is set to be decided in the coming days in the U.S. 2nd Circuit Court, the jurisdiction in which the original loans were contracted. The decision will impact whether certain hedge funds commonly known as "vulture funds"—funds that buy a struggling country’s debt for pennies on the dollar and then sue for the full amount when a country is in recovery—will continue to extort poor countries.

The long 2nd Circuit Court proceedings between Argentina and hedge funds NML Capital and Aurelius have propelled the international debt crisis into the spotlight. It’s been called the “debt trial of the century,” and the proceedings could have the most far-reaching impacts on global poverty in our lifetime.

The U.S. 2nd Circuit Court is the case's last stop before the U.S. Supreme Court, and if the vulture funds win, it will mean these funds will be allowed to more aggressively target poor countries in financial recovery. Argentina would possibly default. But if Argentina wins, it will be much harder for these types of hedge funds to exploit poor countries in the future, destabilize emerging economies, and target assets that should be improving the lives of the world's most vulnerable people.

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Because the U.S. government acknowledges that this behavior hurts legitimate investors and poor people, the Obama Administration filed a friend-of-the-court brief that argued that a ruling against Argentina could make it much harder for poor countries or countries in financial recovery to access credit and restructure debts. The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank are similarly critical of vulture funds.

How they work

Vulture funds create an international version of a situation that often takes place on the individual level: You lose your job and you can’t pay your debts. You file for bankruptcy and restructure your debts, but the owners of your hospital debt and credit card debt refuse to negotiate. Instead, these debts are sold for almost nothing to collection agencies when it could have been resolved directly with you. The collection agencies hover while you are trying to get back on your feet. When they find out a relative gave you $200 to take your daughter to the dentist, the collection agencies seize the money.

The equivalent impacts on a poor country just getting on the other side of a financial crisis are devastating. In 1999, a vulture fund called Donegal International bought a debt owed by Zambia for a knock-down price of $3.3 million. Most of Zambia's debt was canceled and the country began saving $40 million a year when they stopped repaying loans to the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. After Zambia received this debt relief, Donegal sued the African nation for $55 million and in April 2007, the court ruled that Zambia must pay $15.4 million—roughly 65 percent of the debt relief that was specifically directed for development projects. It was a huge profit for the vulture fund and a theft from the poorest Zambians.

Typically, vulture funds refuse to negotiate with countries who are indebted to them. They often make 400 percent profits with their legal proceedings, which often take place in New York or London courts where previous contracts on the loans were signed. “These funds are among the very worst actors in our international financial system," notes Dr. Collins Magalasi, executive director of the Zimbabwe-based African Forum and Network on Debt and Development. "They are aggressive, selfish, and greedy. In fact, they are so egregious that most legitimate investors won’t stand in the same room with them.”

And those running the funds continue to lobby for even greater powers.

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Last June, the organization I work for, Jubilee USA Network, along with our partners at American Jewish World Service, put enough pressure on New York legislative bodies to stop proposed legislation that would allow vulture funds to sue a struggling country, even after a court had rejected their claims.

Then in November, Argentina's case was brought to the U.S. District Court, which ruled in favor of the hedge funds. Argentina was ordered to pay $1.3 billion to NML Capital and other creditors it represented. When Argentina appealed, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals froze the payout to hear new arguments from both sides.

In February, the federal appeals court heard the arguments and ultimately asked Argentina to outline a payment plan. The plan the country laid out would essentially give the holdout creditors the same deal as 92 percent of the creditors that had previously restructured after Argentina’s default. It still offered a significant profit to the "vulture" funds.

The hedge funds rejected this plan; now we wait for the U.S. 2nd Circuit Court to issue a final ruling.

Last October, the Libertad was returned to Argentine waters by Ghana. We hope to see a similar outcome in the case of NML Capital LTD, v. The Republic of Argentina. The legal outcome will either offer more devastation or greater protections for the world’s poorest and most vulnerable people.

Eric LeCompte wrote this op-ed for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas and practical actions. Eric is the executive director of Jubilee USA Network, an alliance of more than 75 U.S. organizations, 250 faith communities and 50 Jubilee global partners.  Jubilee USA Network has won critical global financial reforms and more than $130 billion in debt relief for the world’s poorest countries. www.jubileeusa.org

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Volunteers staff a free store where residents can access free food, clothing, and information about the neighborhood's environmental problems. Photo by Tar Sands Blockade.

The playground in Manchester, a neighborhood on Houston’s east side, is empty much of the time. Children who play for too long here often start to cough. They go back inside, leaving an empty swing set in the shadow of a nearby oil refinery.

For the residents of Manchesters, the effects of the Keystone XL pipeline will be right next door.

Yudith Nieto, 24, has lived in Manchester since her family came from Mexico when she was a small child. While it’s OK to visit the playground, she says, it’s not OK to bring her camera. On several occasions, security guards from the Valero refinery next door have appeared and ask her to leave, claiming that taking pictures in the park was “illegal.” They’ve even brought in Houston police as reinforcements. Valero, one of the major oil companies operating in this industrial part of Houston, keeps its security busy: Nieto says that they have harassed documentary filmmakers and journalists. And when college students participating in an “alternative spring break” program came to the park to talk to her about the neighborhood’s problems, a guard drove up in an unmarked vehicle and took video of the meeting on his cellphone.“I'm not afraid of the attention I'm getting from these people,” Nieto says, “because we want people to know that we're aware.”

Children from the Manchester neighborhood in Houston play within sight of an oil refinery smokestack. Photo by Tar Sands Blockade.

Manchester, one of Houston’s oldest neighborhoods, is surrounded by industry on all sides: a Rhodia chemical plant; a car crushing facility; a water treatment plant; a train yard for hazardous cargo; a Goodyear synthetic rubber plant; oil refineries belonging to Lyondell Basell, Valero, and Texas Petro-Chemicals; as well as one of the busiest highways in the city. Industrial development continues uninterrupted down the Houston Ship Channel for another 50 miles south to the Gulf of Mexico. The refineries around Houston have been called the “keystone to Keystone” because they’re expected to process 90 percent of tar sands crude from Alberta if the controversial Keystone XL pipeline is completed.

It’s one of the most polluted neighborhoods in the U.S., one where smokestacks grace every backyard view. But it’s taking on a new significance as the terminus of Keystone because the pipeline is at the center of the highest-stakes environmental battle in recent years. As international pressure builds, residents are beginning to organize, educate themselves, and speak out for the health of their families.

For them, the struggle over Keystone not a political game. It’s not even about climate change, at least not exclusively. The effects of the pipeline will be right next door.

A grassroots movement begins to grow

Manchester is in some ways typical of low-income urban neighborhoods: it’s almost entirely Latino and African American, with a large number of undocumented immigrants. A full third of residents live below the poverty line. Drugs, unemployment, and gangs are a problem. And there’s a strange smell in the air: sometimes sweet, sometimes sulfurous, often reeking of diesel. The most striking thing is that people here always seem to be sick. They have chronic headaches, nosebleeds, sore throats, and red sores on their skin that take months to heal.

It took a groundbreaking study by the Houston Chronicle in 2005 to reveal for the first time the extent of the air pollution here. It identified five human carcinogens ( a 2010 EPA study identified eight), including enough benzene that one scientist told the Chronicle that living in Manchester was “like sitting in traffic 24/7.” Toxin levels “were high enough that they would trigger a full-scale federal investigation if these communities were hazardous waste sites,” the Chronicle wrote.

Given this, it’s easy to understand why there are so many chronic respiratory problems. But the health risks go beyond asthma: for children living within two miles of the Houston Ship Channel, chances of contracting acute lymphocytic leukemia are 56 percent higher than for children only ten miles away. “Children are being bombarded with toxins every day of their lives,” Nieto says.

Nieto, like many others in Manchester, grew up with asthma. Now an after-school teacher at Southwest Elementary, she spends her spare time working to organize this community, which has long been paralyzed by poverty, language barriers, and lack of access to information about exactly what is making them sick. But the business of grassroots organizing is a slow one. It’s family to family, house to house. Many residents have reasons to resist taking action. They’re preoccupied with earning a living, fearful of authorities—often because of their legal status—and hesitant to accept just how bad their air might be.

The free store is tiny, but represents an alternative to the feelings of helplessness that have long been dominant here.

Most people, Nieto says, just want to get out of Manchester. But they can’t afford rents anywhere else, and it’s impossible to sell. After all, who would buy a house with an oil refinery in the backyard?

So far, government representatives have been unwilling to act on behalf of residents who live along the Ship Channel. Juan Parras, a community organizer who founded Texas Environmental Justice Advocacy Services, or TEJAS, says that a major goal is simply holding public officials accountable and enforcing the laws already in place under the Clean Air Act. But in a state where oil is king, he says, “our elected officials are more responsive to industry than they are to community needs.” Fossil-fuel companies—and the politicians whose campaigns they fund—stand to profit enormously from projects like the Keystone XL pipeline, Parras says. “They have our elected officials in their back pockets.”

Where grassroots meets DIY

But residents of Manchester are finding ways to take action that don’t depend on those representatives. Alongside two organizers from the group Tar Sands Blockade, Nieto, her partner Emmanuel, and a few other young people have set up a “free store” with regular hours. It’s an outdoor community space based in a neighbor’s yard, a tent and some tables crammed with information and arts-and-crafts materials for children. The store offers free donated clothes, food, information on air pollution, meetings of local government officials, and trainings in skills like talking to the media and filing pollution complaints with the city.

A man holds a sign as residents peruse the free store in Manchester. Photo by Tar Sands Blockade.

The free store starts to address some of the immediate, daily needs for things like clothing and healthy food, which might prevent residents from engaging politically. It seems tiny in comparison with the industrial behemoth that’s so close. But it represents a critical shift towards mutual aid and self-sufficiency, an alternative to the feelings of helplessness that have long been dominant here. By creating a space where neighbors can come together to take control of their own needs, organizers hope they’ll pave the way for deeper empowerment.

After a small rally and march last year, two activists from the Gulf Coast locked themselves to trucks entering a Valero facility in Manchester and launched a 45-day hunger strike, demanding that Valero divest from the Keystone XL pipeline. For now, the people risking arrest in these actions remain outsiders—U.S. citizens with greater access to resources and support. For many locals who struggle with supporting families under already difficult conditions, civil disobedience isn’t an option.

For Nieto, though, it’s about “building the support from people that I’ve known all my life.” Residents are mistrustful of even the most well-intentioned outsiders. That puts Nieto and the small handful of other young people from Manchester in a unique position to create change from the inside.

A critical position

The Alberta tar sands and the Keystone XL pipeline have taken on a monumental significance for the North American environmental movement. It’s not just another pipeline; former NASA climate scientist James Hansen famously referred to it as “the fuse to the biggest carbon bomb on the planet.” In February, it was a rallying point for the largest demonstration on climate change in U.S. history. Over 60,000 people have already signed a pledge to engage in civil disobedience should the final leg of the pipeline be approved.

If that happens, almost all of the tar sands crude that flows through Keystone will be processed at refineries in East Houston. Activists from Tar Sands Blockade say that Valero has contract rights with TransCanada, which will allow them to purchase up to three-quarters of Keystone’s capacity. Tar sands crude oil is much more toxic than regular crude, and contains 11 times more sulfur and nickel, and 5 times more lead.

That puts neighborhoods like Manchester in a critical position not only to affect the future of the pipeline—and by extension the fight against climate change—but to raise environmental justice issues around race and class into the national conversation. After decades in the shadow of the refineries, Ship Channel residents have the potential to play a major role in the debate. The political pressure around Keystone might be just big enough to catalyze both residents and public officials to change the composition of the air in East Houston and the carbon in our atmosphere.

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What’s more, East Texas is the belly of the beast: the heart of America’s oil country and the seat of power for the fossil fuels industry. Juan Parras of TEJAS says he tells national environmental groups concerned about climate change to get involved in Manchester. “Because if you can fight them here,” he says, “and beat them to the punch, it’s going to have a huge impact on the rest of the nation.”

But Parras also worries that spotlighting Keystone will allow the media to forget the myriad other issues faced by residents of Manchester—that even if the pipeline is stopped, public attention will move on, and local people will still be dealing with polluted air, cancer and asthma, and the poverty that makes it impossible to leave.

Yudith Nieto, through her activism, has started to travel. She has met organizers from places all along Keystone’s path, including indigenous people from the Alberta tar sands.

Meeting them only deepened her sense of shared destiny, she says, the sense that she and her neighbors are not alone. “It put everything else into perspective,” she says. “This has been going on for such a long time. I became an ally to those people, and they became allies to me.”

Keystone is a threat to the health of communities along its path, from the source in Alberta to the terminus in Texas. But it also presents a challenge, and an opportunity, for those communities to realize what they have in common and make their voices heard. What’s at stake is not only the air quality in East Houston, but the stability of the climate across the planet.

Kristin Moe wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media project that fuses powerful ideas and practical actions. Kristin writes about climate, grassroots movements and social change. Follow her on Twitter @yo_Kmoe.

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In his book Violence, psychologist James Gilligan asked a Massachusetts prison inmate, “What do you want so badly that you would sacrifice everything in order to get it?”

Could it be that for human animals fear itself has become a danger?

The inmate declared, “Pride. Dignity. Self-esteem … And I’ll kill every motherfucker in that cell block if I have to in order to get it.”

Or, as another inmate said, “I’ve got to have my self-respect, and I’ve declared war on the whole world till I get it.”

Pride, dignity, respect, agency—a sense that we matter—these are feelings largely shaped interpersonally. We depend upon the social fabric to get them. But for many, these things are in tatters. Fewer and fewer of us feel a sense of belonging, and we're more and more preoccupied with the desperate scramble for belongings.

We see fear’s face everywhere, whether in a Congress debating assault weapons or in schools introducing lock-down drills. French philosopher Patrick Viveret has called fear the “emotional plague of our planet.”

For most species fear is key to survival. Sensing danger, a healthy animal experiences instantaneous physical changes that enable it to escape; then, once the threat has passed, the impala literally shakes off its fear and runs back to join its group.

But could it be that for human animals fear itself has become a danger? To explore the possibility, a place to start is asking what humans fear most.

It is the loss of standing with others, the fear of being cast out by the tribe. Rather than being hyper-individualists, Homo sapiens are profoundly social creatures—the most social of all species. This sense of standing is inseparable from trust. To thrive, we need to trust that we count in the eyes of others and will, therefore, be treated with respect. In a word, our fear is loss of dignity.

Almost equal is our fear of powerlessness. Human beings need to feel that we make a difference. Social psychologist Erich Fromm argued in The Heart of Man that what characterizes man is that “he is driven to make his imprint on the world.” And later he dismissed Descartes’ axiom about a human essence centered in thought, declaring instead: “I am, because I effect.”

When these essential needs for connection and agency are unmet, we go nuts. We try to get respect by whatever means possible. If peaceful means seem closed off, violence it is.

Inequality has soared to historic levels. In 2010, the top 1 percent garnered 93 percent of all income gains. And in countries and states, “high levels of trust are linked to low levels of inequality,” report British scholars Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett in The Spirit Level.

Our crisis is not that we are too individualistic or selfish. It’s that we’ve lost touch with how deeply social we really are

Trapped in a giant game of musical chairs, we run faster and faster to edge out the guy ahead.  With economic rules that increasingly concentrate wealth, we know we could be the next one kicked out, no matter how quick our pace. So we take on debt, juggle three jobs, cheat in school—whatever it takes to stay “in.”

And our children are most sensitive to this fear of exclusion. Those who’ve felt bullied, unable to fit in, misunderstood, without a voice in those most social of places—schools—are more likely to become psychotic and violent, including against themselves.

In a culture of fear of disconnection, those at the bottom feel most dismissed and discounted. Adam Smith, the supposed (but misunderstood) champion of the market more than two centuries ago grasped the devastating power of exclusion: Poverty, he wrote in his Theory of Moral Sentiments, “places … [a person] out of the sight of mankind … [T]o feel that we are taken no notice of, necessarily damps the most agreeable hope … of human nature.”

In this vein, joblessness isn’t just about money. It’s about loss of “membership.” Martin Luther King once said that “in our society it is murder, psychologically, to deprive a man of a job or an income. You are in substance saying to that man he has no right to exist.”

And that is exactly how many feel: A rise of 1 percent in joblessness in the United States is accompanied by an increase of roughly 1 percent in the suicide rate.

In our world of increasing inequalities, suicide now claims more lives than homicide and war combined. Americans own more than four in ten of the world’s privately held guns, and two-thirds of U.S. gun deaths are suicides.

And when people feel “dissed,” violence toward the powerless increases, too: The Washington Post reports that each 1 percent increase in unemployment is "associated with at least a 0.50 per 1,000 increase in confirmed child maltreatment reports one year later.” Since the recession began in 2007, the number of U.S. children killed by maltreatment has risen by about 20 percent to more than five children each day. Thus, our culture of fear gets passed down from one generation to another.

So, what can we do to break free from the spiral of fear and worsening violence?

Maybe we begin here: recognizing that our crisis is not that we humans are too individualistic or too selfish. It’s that we’ve lost touch with how deeply social we really are. Easing the fear at the root of so much pain and violence that generates more fear—from suicide to child abuse to school massacres—comes as we embrace the obvious: We are creatures who, in order to thrive individually, depend on inclusive communities in which all can thrive.

Freedom starts there. We build it by standing up for rules on which inclusive, trusting community depends: fair rules, for example, that keep wealth circulating and strictly out of public decision-making, and rules that ensure decent jobs for all.

This pathway out of a violence-soaked culture is no foreign “ism.” It is what’s proven essential to our species’ thriving—communities of trust without which we destroy not just others, but ourselves as well.

Frances Moore Lappé is a contributing editor to YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. This article is adapted from EcoMind: Changing the Way We Think to Create the World We Want (new in paperback from Nation Books).

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Workers in the restaurant industry are among the most likely to be paid minimum wage. Photo by Kymberly Janisch.

One of the most compelling proposals to come out of this year's State of the Union Address was President Obama's call to boost the federal minimum wage to $9 per hour—up from the current minimum of $7.25 per hour—and to tie future increases to the cost of living. To create public awareness about the need for the raise, officials from the U.S. Department of Labor have been touring the country to meet with working people who are trying to live on the current minimum.

Mary Beth Maxwell, acting deputy administrator of the U.S. Department of Labor's Wage and Hour Division. Photo by Jobs with Justice.

Prominent in this effort has been Mary Beth Maxwell, the acting deputy administrator of the department's Wage and Hour Division. Having previously served as the founding director of American Rights at Work and as a top organizer for Jobs With Justice, Maxwell was one of the more well-known social movement leaders to join the administration. In recent years, her department has hired hundreds more investigators than were previously being deployed. As a result, Maxwell explains, "just this past year, we got $280 million in back wages for workers, the highest in the history of the Wage and Hour division."

I recently spoke with Maxwell about the drive to raise the minimum wage, what she has learned from her tour among low-wage workers, and why the timing is right.

Amy Dean: As you’ve been criss-crossing the country and engaging in conversations with people working at the minimum wage, have you noticed trends among those facing wage stagnation?

Mary Beth Maxwell: It’s been an incredibly humbling and inspiring experience to be part of these roundtables. I’ve been to Pittsburgh and San Antonio and Houston and Minneapolis and Gary, Ind. In each city, we’ve gathered a diverse group of workers that are working at or near the minimum wage. They’re white; they’re African American; they’re Latino. They’re women and they’re men. Many of them are working parents.

“Some of them have been moved to tears because they want to be able to support their families with their work.”

One of the myths in our country is that minimum wage workers are just teenagers in the suburbs earning extra pocket money. That’s not who I’ve been seeing at these minimum wage roundtables. I’ve been seeing and hearing stories of people who are working very, very hard. They are proud of the work they do, and they are frustrated. Some of them have been moved to tears because they want to be able to support their families with their work, with their wages. They don’t want to have to go for programs or supplements. They say, “I work hard, and I should be able to support my kids with what I earn.” It’s a matter of pride and dignity for people.

It's also been powerful for me when we have asked the question, "If we get this raise to $9 an hour, what would you do with that extra $70 in your paycheck each week?" One woman in San Antonio said, "I would buy fresh vegetables for my boys, so that it’s not just rice and beans and potatoes every night." Another woman said, "I would go to the dentist, because I haven’t been taking care of myself." Many people said they would buy medicine for themselves that they haven't been taking. It's the basics that people need.

One woman in Houston said to me, "I would go to the grocery store and buy a pack of hamburger, and spaghetti noodles, and sauce, so I could cook them all that night for my kids and not have to choose which of those things I would buy to feed them." People do not have enough money to cover the basics, even people who are working full-time or working multiple jobs.

“The minimum wage has just not kept pace with cost of living for people in this country.”

Amy: Politics is often about timing. Why is it important to increase the minimum wage now?

Mary Beth: We all know that, in these hard economic times, a lot of people are really hurting. It's just wrong that in this wealthiest of nations, someone could work full-time at minimum wage and make only $14,500 a year. If you have a couple of kids, that means you’re living in poverty. So I think the moment is exactly right for us to say it’s time to do something about that. It’s part of the basic bargain in America—that no matter who you are, no matter where you come from, you work hard and play by the rules, you should be able to have a decent job and support yourself and your family. Right now, the minimum wage has just not kept pace with cost of living for people in this country.

Amy: Over the past two decades, campaigns have blossomed across the country advocating different ways to increase local minimum wages or to establish living wage laws. To what extent do those efforts support change at the federal level?

Mary Beth: I think the work at the state, county, and municipal levels has been incredibly important. Since 2009, the last time that the federal minimum wage was raised, 19 states and the District of Columbia have gone on their own and raised their minimum wages. That speaks to the broad public support for this. Over 70 percent of Americans support the notion of raising the federal minimum wage. I think all of the work that has gone into those campaigns in states and cities and counties has meant not only concrete victories for working people—putting more money in their pockets—but also building a stronger movement around the need to raise wages and reward work.

“It's just wrong that in this wealthiest of nations, someone could work full-time and make only $14,500 a year.”

Amy: We know from experience that employers who oppose minimum wage or living wage increases always argue that jobs will move away, or that they will have to lay people off if the raises pass. How are you inoculating against those arguments this time around?

Mary Beth: As you correctly say, they’re really the same arguments that get trotted out every time we have a debate about raising the minimum wage. The good news is that the economic research has, over and over again, disputed their claims. Raising the minimum wage doesn’t have a negative impact on job growth.

The other piece, I think, is that this is good for our economy. When you put money in the pockets of working people, they spend it. They spend it on groceries, on gas, on shoes for their kids to go to school. And consumer spending has always been an engine of growth in the American economy. So it’s more than the idea that this doesn’t hurt job growth; it is good for the economic recovery to raise the minimum wage.

Amy Dean is a fellow of The Century Foundation and principal of ABD Ventures, LLC, an organizational development consulting firm that works to develop new and innovative organizing strategies for social change organizations. Dean is co-author, with David Reynolds, of A New New Deal: How Regional Activism Will Reshape the American Labor Movement. Dean has worked for nearly two decades at the cross section of labor and community based organizations linking policy and research with action and advocacy. You can follow Amy on twitter @amybdean, or she can be reached via www.amybdean.com .

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Pope Francis waves to crowds as he arrives to his inauguration mass in St. Peter's Square at the Vatican. Photo by Christus Vincit.

As the Catholic Church enters a new era of leadership under Pope Francis I, religious organizations around the world have congratulated and welcomed the new pope, hoping for a new era of interfaith cooperation. Several were willing to offer advice to both Pope Francis and the Catholic faithful that, if followed, could let Catholics, Muslims, Jews, and others better work together for a more peaceful world.

Pope Francis follows one of the most conservative and contentious popes in recent memory in respect to interfaith relations, and he may have his work cut out for him restoring the trust and mutual respect compromised by Pope Benedict XVI’s approach toward Judaism, Islam, and Native American religions.

In 2006, Benedict gave a lecture at the University of Regensburg in which he quoted a 14th century Byzantine Emperor, saying, “Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.” Benedict later explained the quote was for the purposes of the lecture and not his personal opinion. In 2007, Benedict lifted restrictions on the Tridentine Mass—a Latin liturgy banned by the Second Vatican Council that calls in part for the conversion of Jews to Christianity and an end to what it calls Jewish spiritual “blindness.” Also in 2007, Benedict claimed in an address to the Brazilian people that the Native Americans “silently longed” for Christianity, causing another storm of indignation and disappointment.

Pope Francis follows one of the most conservative and contentious popes in recent memory.

“Pope Francis can certainly repair the damage,” said Mike Ghouse, a spokesperson for the World Muslim Congress in Dallas, Texas. By distancing the modern church from the destructive closed-mindedness of the past and admitting wrongs “in the humility of Jesus,” Francis can help restore the relationship between Christians and Muslims, according to Ghouse.

Already, Pope Francis has displayed such humility. Last Thursday, he visited a jail in Rome where he washed the feet of prisoners, including a female Muslim convict. This marks a notable break with tradition, as Muslims are not typically included in clerical foot-washing ceremonies.

As far as Ghouse is concerned, both Christianity and Islam “focus on serving mankind, [and] treating others as you want to be treated” regardless of theological differences, and any violent conflict between the two is “politics” as a “byproduct of fear and insecurity.”

Ghouse, also president of the Foundation for Pluralism, believes the pope has the power to bring faiths together in order to achieve practical goals as well.

“Pope Francis can call on Muslims, Christians, Hindus, Jews, Sikhs, Buddhists, atheists, and others to jointly serve,” Ghouse said. “Eventually the feeling of doing good things will minimize the conflicts to the back burner, and people will learn to respect the otherness of others without having to agree.”

Pope Francis might be especially suited to changing education and practice, thanks to his career with the Jesuit clerical order

The Hindu American Foundation represents an inherently pluralistic faith and hopes that Pope Francis will reaffirm the church’s past commitments to respecting varieties of doctrine and celebrating similar values.

“Foundation leaders expressed hope that the Catholic Church, under Pope Francis I, as he will be called, will respect and privilege pluralism and interfaith relations, based on earlier efforts with Nostra Aetate,” the foundation said in a press release.

The Nostra Aetate is a proclamation, made by Pope Paul VI in 1965, that defines the Catholic Church’s relationship with non-Catholic religions. “[The church] considers above all in this declaration what men have in common and what draws them to fellowship,” the Nostra Aetate says. It continues:

The Catholic Church rejects nothing that is true and holy in [non-Catholic religions]. She regards with sincere reverence those ways of conduct and of life, those precepts and teachings which, though differing in many aspects from the ones she holds and sets forth, nonetheless often reflect a ray of that Truth which enlightens all men.

Despite this official recognition of truth in other faiths, the Hindu American Foundation is concerned the Nostra Aetate doesn’t go far enough. According to Padma Kuppa, a member of the foundation’s board of directors, Catholicism as a whole needs to better understand religious pluralism and the effect evangelism has on pluralistic faiths if Catholics are to mend damaged relationships.

“Whenever a faith has a mission of conversion, that’s something that needs to be examined,” Kuppa said, referring to what she called “predatory proselytizing”—everything from social pressure to conform to forceful conversions throughout Western history—on the part of Catholics. Kuppa encouraged the church and its leaders to be conscious of the impact these practices had and have on non-Catholics throughout the world.

“People will learn to respect the otherness of others without having to agree.”

The American Jewish Committee, an organization devoted to global Jewish advocacy, is confident in Pope Francis’ ability to strengthen interfaith dialogue and collaboration, especially with the Jewish faith and community. “There has never been a pope who has had so much personal experience, engagement, and involvement with a contemporary Jewish community as Pope Francis,” said Rabbi David Rosen, the International Director of Interreligious Affairs for the committee and one of few non-Catholics to be awarded the title of Papal Knight. Considering the new pope’s immediate gestures of goodwill to Jewish and other faith communities, including letters and invitations to inaugural ceremonies, Rosen finds it easy to be confident in strengthening Catholic-Jewish relations.

When it comes to any “unfinished business” between the faiths, Rosen said, “The major challenge is an educational challenge.” Despite a massive shift in church culture over the past several decades, from discriminating against Jews to embracing Judaism as the theological root of Christianity, “there are many places in the world where…Jews do not appear on the Catholic ‘radar screen’ and places where even bishops don’t know the content of the Nostra Aetate,” Rosen said. Pope Francis’ decades working with Jewish communities could provide a greater shift toward universal Catholic understanding of Judaism.

Pope Francis might be especially suited to changing education and practice within the wide variety of Catholic faithful, thanks to his career with the Jesuit clerical order, a catholic order known for their 16th to 18th century evangelism in Asia and the Americas. “The Jesuits had some issues with the Vatican over questions of local adaptation of Catholic rites,” said Dr. Jose Bento da Silva, a professor at Warwick University and author of the upcoming book The Government of the Society of Jesus.

“Pope Francis I is not only a former member of an organization that knows several practices need to be adapted; he himself is quite a multinational figure.” Francis was born to Italian parents in Argentina, where he was raised and served as Bishop Jorge Mario Bergoglio before being elected pope.

Regardless of past tensions between the Catholic Church and other faiths, all agree that “what’s done is done,” Kuppa said. “What we need to do is focus on the future.”

Chris Francis wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Chris is a recent graduate from Illinois Wesleyan University where he studied English literature and religion while working as managing editor and editor-in-chief of IWU’s student newspaper, The Argus.

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