
{"id":22151,"date":"2011-12-01T11:57:12","date_gmt":"2011-12-01T16:57:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.carrborocitizen.com\/main\/?p=22151"},"modified":"2011-12-05T14:20:34","modified_gmt":"2011-12-05T19:20:34","slug":"time-to-take-direct-action","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/2011\/12\/01\/time-to-take-direct-action\/","title":{"rendered":"Time to take direct action"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>By Tim Toben<\/strong><br \/>\nDerrick Jensen, author of <em>Deep Green Resistance<\/em>, asks two questions: What do we want more of in our lives, and how do we get there? We\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re numb to it, but I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll say it anyway: Our culture is destroying our planet. We watch and participate in the slow poisoning of our children, fed a diet of processed food, processed news and processed education. Few children experience the natural world with the kind of intimacy that we and our parents did. <\/p>\n<p>Richard Louv has dubbed the effects of that schism as \u00e2\u20ac\u0153nature deficit disorder.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d\u00c2\u00a0Like Jensen, I want each year to bring more migrating songbirds and fewer incidents of dioxin in mothers\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 breast milk. So how do we get there? Here also, I agree with Jensen that all options must be on the table. The mainstream environmental movement has failed to slow the industrial juggernaut that puts our planet and the children of all species in peril. <\/p>\n<p>As GDP grows, ecosystem health declines. Because most of us are just trying to pay our bills and support our families, we rarely stop to examine the systemic flaws that govern our actions. The Occupy movement has shined a light on those systemic failures, and I strongly support it.<\/p>\n<p>Until last year, I operated within that system. Mine was one of five local families who came together to create a model green building in Chapel Hill. We met with community organizers, ministers and neighbors, all of whom endorsed the project. We received unanimous approval by the Chapel Hill Town Council and were encouraged to proceed. We hired arguably the leading green architect in the world to design it. It would be a prototype that consumed half the energy of conventional buildings, but like every prototype, it would cost a whole lot more than the second, 50th or 500th one built. Some would not be able to afford to live there. <\/p>\n<p>To finance the project, we signed a deal (aka a \u00e2\u20ac\u0153construction loan\u00e2\u20ac\u009d) with the devil (Bank of America) on July 17, 2008.\u00c2\u00a0Three months later, the banks, gambling our mortgages in the great Wall Street casino, tanked the U.S. economy. The federal government intervened with TARP (the Troubled Asset Relief Program), but instead of paying forward that largess, the banks tightened credit policy and crushed commercial projects like ours and foreclosed on families across America. <\/p>\n<p>The partners of Greenbridge lost everything we invested. Last fiscal quarter, Bank of America reported a $6 billion profit \u00e2\u20ac\u201c $2 billion a month.<\/p>\n<p>And while the corporations usurp the wealth of communities, even the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153green\u00e2\u20ac\u009d movement has been co-opted by industry. The omnipresent green labels on everything from light bulbs to lawnmowers suggest that we are doing a lot to change direction, but the opposite is true. We are an industrial growth economy, driving straight toward the ecological cliff. We&#8217;ve even accelerated, over the past 10 years, from 60 to 65 mph. We have to stop buying stuff. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s going to take a few brave souls standing in the middle of the road risking their lives to slow us down. <\/p>\n<p>Two months ago, I went to Washington, D.C., and participated in the\u00c2\u00a0350.org\u00c2\u00a0protest of the Keystone XL Pipeline outside the White House. Like others who think that pumping dirty tar sands oil over aquifers and farmland is nuts, I was arrested and taken to the Anacostia jail. It was a small act of civil disobedience, but a long way\u00c2\u00a0from my service on President Obama\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s National Finance Committee in 2008. <\/p>\n<p>It is time for direct action of every type, and it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s encouraging to see more and creative uses of civil disobedience. We are in financial, social and ecological crisis, and I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m grateful to all who are willing to take risks of every sort to fundamentally alter America\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s direction.<\/p>\n<p><em>Tim Toben is one of the developers of the Greenbridge project and a former member of the N.C. Energy Council.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Derrick Jensen, author of <em>Deep Green Resistance<\/em>, asks two questions: What do we want more of in our lives, and how do we get there?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-22151","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-opinion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22151","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22151"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22151\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22219,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22151\/revisions\/22219"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22151"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22151"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22151"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}