All Our Relatives

Image by R. Crumb

“The Ecotopian Solution” in R.Crumb’s triptych is the world I dream of when I envision finding my way to bioregionalism. Small scale, low-tech, organic, close to the earth. In fact, this is the only way of life that has any possibility of continuing in a world of finite resources.

I learned about bioregionalism in anthropology classes in graduate school, where I studied Athabaskan and Inuit cultures that lived a life we would call bioregional, but for which they had no name. It was just life. Later, I learned more about this lifeway today from Alaska native people in their villages.

Athabaskan society was, and still is to a large extent, organized around kinship groups who live along the river systems of Alaska, Canada and the United States Pacific northwest. Theirs is a matrilocal clan-based society, that is organized around a moiety, or division of clans into two main groups, either eagle and raven, or wolf and raven. They live in villages on the river banks of watersheds, along which they count their kin as being more closely related than others of clan and moiety on other watersheds.

Clan-based societies often have what is called a social storage system based on activating fictive kinships in times of need. This means that when a village or villages in a bioregion suffer food or other resource shortages, the members of the village can go to other villages that have more and find clan members who will help them, whether or not they are blood kin. These “cousins” will be recognized in the village, even if no one has ever seen them before, a grave situation in a land where strangers are viewed with extreme suspicion.

This social storage system is supported by cross clan marriages, meaning that a clan member from one moiety, eagle/wolf or raven would marry a member of the opposite clan on the opposite moiety, in this case raven. The way it works in a family is that girls are raised in their mother’s clan and marry a man from their mother’s opposite clan, usually their father’s clan. Boys are raised by their mother’s brother and marry a women, often a cousin, who is from his mother’s clan.

When there is a death in the family, members of the opposite clan of the person who has died prepare the body for burial, arrange the funeral and present gifts to the family. The family of the deceased gives gifts to all the members of the opposite clan who took part in the funeral. A year after the death, the opposite clan throws a memorial potlatch for the dead, at which gifts are exchanged between the two clans.

This social system creates mutually intertwined relationships of obligation that help to prevent intervillage conflict. It’s hard to attack your neighbors when they’re also your kin.

The clan system is uniquely adapted to bioregional living, where animals and plants are viewed as relatives as much as men, women and children. When you depend on kin for your health and well-being, and they depend on you, you’re less likely to inflict injury on them or deprive them of needed resources.

 

What Happened to Bioregionalism?

I’m enjoying a double-digit birth anniversary this year: 66. The 60s are supposed to be a significant age, the time when we pass from Middle Age to become “Elderly,” or as we’re referred to nowadays, a “Senior.”

I prefer to think of myself as an elder, in the ancient meaning of “one having authority by virtue of age and experience.” As I review my life so far, I wonder what happened to some of the thoughts and movements of my younger years, those passionate pursuits I shared with many others through the 60s, 70s and 80s.

Bioregionalism, for instance.

Despite the fact that globalism and “The Global Economy”are the chief instigators of excessive exploitation and consumption of natural raw materials that now plagues the Earth, thus laying waste to the neighborhood, and the neighbors hereabout, the antonym of globalism, bioregionalism, is all but forgotten.

First, a definition: Bioregionalism:

“a political, cultural, and ecological system or set of views based on naturally defined areas called bioregions. Bioregions are defined through physical and environmental features, including watershed boundaries and soil and terrain characteristics. Bioregionalism stresses that the determination of a bioregion is also a cultural phenomenon, and emphasizes local populations, knowledge, and solutions.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioregionalism#cite_note-1)

This is the bioregion where I live, the Central Coast of California, betwixt the Santa Cruz Mountains and the Pacific Ocean near Monterey Bay. It’s dominated by the San Lorenzo River watershed in the center and the Pajaro River watershed in the east and south. Interestingly, this bioregion is home to the University of California Santa Cruz, where Raymond Dasmann developed the principles and practice of Bioregionalism in the 70s and 80s, along with Peter Berg from the Bay Area bioregion some 70 miles north.

To a student of anthropology, bioregionalism seems familiar, logical and characteristic of human development from earliest human cultures up until agriculture began to reshape human relationships to the natural world. Almost all early cultures were organized bioregionally, usually around watersheds, since rivers were the easiest way to get around most parts of the world in the absence of roads. Alaska Native groups were organized along Alaskan river systems up until World War II, when the money economy took over most of traditional social organization.

People living bioregionally know the cycles and patterns of resource availability of the bioregion in which they live. They know when food grows and ripens, when the rains will come, from what direction and how much rain to expect. They know the habits and patterns of the animals and plants of the place and their interrelationships that help them all thrive. They know how to live in place without destroying the place in which they live.

The native people of my bioregion lived here for 8,000 years or so, in an ecosystem thriving with biodiversity and fecundity. Somehow, in the midst of such abundance, they did not over populate this place, they did not kill each other off in wars, they did not guard their food from others but practiced cooperation and sharing among their own kinship based groups and with others adjoining. They practiced a form of social storage, such that, when one group fell on hard times, other groups would give of their food and supplies, recognizing widespread fictive kinship ties in times of shortages.

When hunting and gathering, these bioregional people practiced an ancient culture in which the plants and animals were looked on as kin who were aware of the thoughts and actions of their human brethren, and were always treated, talked about and thought about with respect. The hunters’ clothing and equipment was made and decorated to please the spirits of the animals, who were always watching. Hunters took care not to speak of their intended prey before a hunt and always approached the hunt with humility and self-deprecation. When they had killed an animal, they thanked it for giving its life, gave it fresh water and cleaned and prepared the body in respectful, traditional patterns.

Similar practices were followed in gathering plant foods, speaking softly and respectfully, thanking the spirits of the plants for giving themselves for human food and never taking too much from any one place, so as to leave seeds and tubers for future plants and for food for animals who also depended on them.

In such a world, every action was suffused in meaning, a part of the eternal cycle of life and death, the turn of the seasons, the long slow march of climates. The stories told around the fire or oil lamps were the summing up of generations of experience living in place, as part of the place, part of the life and death of the place.

During my time in Alaska, I had opportunities to live with people still practicing, at least in part, the old subsistence lifestyle. They taught me a little bit of how they live in the world as part of the intricate web of life.

When I asked an old hunter foolish questions about why he did the things he did, why he butchered a seal just so, why he turned the moose’s severed head to the north, why he buried some of the bones underneath the spruce tree, he just smiled shyly and said, “Oh, that’s the way the old people did it early days ago.” He wouldn’t admit to any knowledge that would make him smarter than the moose lest the moose hear him and not present himself to be killed.

When I think back on my time with these gentle, bioregional people, and compare their lives with the frantic busyness, acquisitiveness, and overweening self-importance of modern civilized people, I can’t help but wonder where we went wrong.

How did we lose the awe and wonder of a world suffused with meaning? How did we come to worship dead material stuff and ignore the world full of aliveness? When did we lose track of the web of life?

What ever happened to bioregionalism?

What Did We Learn From the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill?

Photo by LJ Evans

It’s March 24th, again. This time it’s 25 years since the Exxon Valdez ran up on the rocks of Bligh Reef and spread death and destruction throughout Prince William Sound.

The world loves an anniversary, especially big ones such as a quarter of a century. But it doesn’t really mean much. Yes, it happened twenty-five years ago. Yes, those of us who were there remember that Spring and Summer that would never end.

Photo by Michael A. Lewis

Memories are dredged up by the photographs of dying animals, desperate attempts to rescue the few that survived, some only temporarily. It was a horrible experience for those of us who were there.

Did we learn anything from the Exxon Valdez oil spill. Depends on what one means by “we.”

Judging by the number of single occupant cars that zoom by my bedroom window of a week day morning commute, I’d say no, “we” didn’t learn much of anything at all.

“We” are still dependent on traveling on our butts in a vehicle fueled by oil drawn from once pristine wild lands, at the expense of all life that once lived there.

Photo by Michael A. Lewis

“We” still make obscene profits from wresting fossil “fuels” from the earth and burning it to produce motion and electricity, while “we” pocket the profits and externalize the environmental costs.

“We” still leave lights on, leave the water running, import exotic food from agribiz farms thousands of miles away, ship materials and products all over the world for the least expense and greatest profit.

What have “we” learned from the Exxon Valdez oil spill? Not a damned thing.

 

Starting the New Year… Right?

Oil ship runs aground in Alaska

Shell oil starts out the New Year… with a ship wreck!

Not an auspicious beginning for what everyone knows and no one admits will be a disaster-ridden effort in the world’s largest technology-free zone. It’s a difficult place just to survive, let alone deal with millions of gallons of toxic crude.

Did we learn nothing from the Exxon Valdez?

What I Learned from the Exxon Valdez

It’s been twenty-three years since I woke up and heard the radio announcer say, “The Exxon Valdez is on the rocks of Bligh Reef and leaking oil.”

Those of us who lived in Valdez and worked through the next three years of industrial strength oil-spill clean-up would have been shocked in disbelief to know that twenty-three years later nothing will have changed.

As I write, Shell is unceremoniously towing two rusting drilling platforms into Arctic waters far more forbidding than the gentle inlets and bays of Prince William Sound 1,000 miles south, where Valdez is the northernmost ice-free port in North America. The fragile rigs face winters of crushing ice constantly on the move, creating craggy pressure ridges as the ice is thrust back and forth by winds and currents. Just like the Deepwater Horizon, they will be drilling holes in deep pools of crude oil and bringing it to the surface, through ever-shifting ice, in waters replete with marine mammals and fish.

An oil spill in the Arctic is nothing like an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, even the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. There is no industrial infrastructure in the Far North, no roads, no deep water ports, no airports, no oil spill equipment, no thousands of volunteers for clean-up crews. There is, however, plenty of ice, snow, temperatures to 60 below zero. Do you know what happens to machinery at 60 below? It stops, unless you keep it running 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. And if it stops, it’s unlikely it will start again until Summer, such as it is. Metal becomes brittle and breaks. Plastic and rubber solidify and crumble. Diesel oil congeals. Propone turns to liquid. Pour out a cup of coffee in the open air and it vaporizes with a WHOOSH! before it hits the ice. It’s a strange, dark, icy world, where nothing is as it is in the Lower 48.

And yet, the oil execs say, “Trust us.” Just as Exxon did so many times in 1989.

The one lesson we learned in Prince William Sound is that once the oil is out of the bottle, there’s no putting it back in. This was in Alaska’s banana belt, with temperate rain forests gracing the shores, warm summer weather, an international airport in Anchorage just 250 miles away, smaller airports nearby in Valdez, Cordova and Kodiak. A highway from Anchorage to Valdez. Oil spill equipment stockpiled at the Alyeska Marine Terminal Facility.

None of this exists in the Chuckchi and Beaufort Seas.

Drilling for oil in the Arctic is just one more environmental disaster waiting to happen.

When do we say, “Enough?’

Won’t we ever say, “No more?”

Nature Always Bats Last

In this article from the Santa Cruz (Scotts Valley/San Jose) Sentinel, Sandy Lydon relates the natural history of the Loma Prieta earthquake that shook the earth round these parts twenty years ago today.

On October 16, 1989, I was in recovery mode on the shores of Prince William Sound some 4,000 miles north of Loam Prieta. I remember hearing about it on the radio, and seeing a picture of Candlestick Park in the Anchorage Daily News.

One must realize that news of earthquakes is a very different thing in Alaska than elsewhere. The 1964 quake established a threshold against which all others are measured. And, in Alaska, earthquakes are almost literally an everyday affair. I can’t remember how many times I stood in a doorway wondering when to make a break for outside, as the house shifted back and forth around me.

Now that I live here within sight of the epicenter of the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, and having felt a couple of notable temblors myself, the effect of earthquakes in densely populated areas has a sobering reality. I know we’ll be safe here, as this house survived the 1989 quake with almost no damage, and has been retrofitted since then. With all of the retelling of twenty year-old ground-shaking tales, I know that others will be less fortunate or prepared when the next one rolls around.

There is nothing that underscores human subservience to Nature more than that moment when the ground moves under your feet and you know there’s absolutely nothing you can do about it.

As they discovered in Candlestick Park twenty years ago, Nature really does bat last!

Palin supports and defends aerial wolf killing

“Brutal” Ad Targets Palin's Aerial Wolf Hunting (VIDEO)

Look at this video.

Copy it.

Spread it liberally.

I fought wolf killers for ten years in Alaska and Canada.

Let everyone know that Palin supports aerial wolf killing for profit.

Let the Alaska tourism industry know that you don’t approve and you won’t travel to Alaska.

Palin from An Alaskan Who Knows

Sarah Palin’s record on environment is abysmal

September 6, 2008

By RICK STEINER
GUEST COLUMNIST

While I disagree with many of Sen. John McCain’s policies, I was willing to concede that he may at least make a wise, rational president and represent a step in the right direction for the nation. No longer. With his pick of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate, he has shown a spectacular, even dangerous lack of judgment.

In addition to her frightening lack of qualification to be vice president (much less president) of the United States, Palin is an evangelical, anti-choice, pro-gun, right-wing conservative who wants creationism taught in schools. She is currently under investigation by the Alaska Legislature for alleged abuse of office. Many of us in Alaska simply cannot imagine Palin having anything to do with U.S. foreign policy, domestic policy, national defense or the countless other affairs of federal governance.

A particularly worrisome aspect of the Palin candidacy is her abysmal record on the environment during her two years as Alaska governor, and how that would translate into national environmental policy if she became vice president. Her environmental record as governor of the nation’s “last frontier” deserves close examination.

Climate change. Although Alaska is ground zero in the crisis of global warming, Palin has done virtually nothing to address the problem except hold meetings and appoint a “climate sub-cabinet” that likewise has done little. Lots of talk, no action.

Although in the past two years the Arctic summer sea ice shrunk to the lowest levels ever recorded, Palin apparently does not believe it is human-induced or cause for alarm. She was asked to establish an Alaska Office on Climate Change, an Alaska Climate Response Fund (based on a tax on Alaska oil production) and emissions reduction targets for Alaska, but has taken no action on those requests.

Polar bears. This summer, Palin filed suit against the Bush administration over the federal listing of polar bears as threatened, saying that her opposition was based on a “comprehensive scientific review.” But when asked to release the scientific review, she refused. The document, later obtained by the public (from the federal government), clearly shows that, contrary to
Palin’s assertions, the state of Alaska’s marine mammal scientists agreed with the federal conclusions that the polar bears are in serious trouble because of global warming and loss of their sea ice habitat, and that they would be gone from Alaska by 2050. Palin clearly decided to oppose the listing in order to protect Arctic oil and gas development, then publicly misrepresented the basis for her decision, and then tried to conceal all of that. Having run for office on a platform of honesty and transparency, this behavior was neither. Her extreme position here puts her to the political right of the Bush /Cheney administration.

Endangered species. Earlier this year, Palin approved a $2 million state appropriation for a conference on the “economic impacts” of the Endangered Species Act, designed to persuade the public that ESA listings were too costly and unwarranted. Recently she agreed to use the money instead to fund the state’s lawsuit against the Bush administration over the polar bear listing — a likely violation of the state constitutional provisions on appropriation. She opposes additional species listings and other protections in Alaska, where many species are at risk because of climate change and other threats.

Predator control. Palin approved and expanded the state’s aerial predator control program, where wolves are shot from aircraft and bears hunted from aircraft and killed upon landing. This year, her state biologists even dragged 14 newborn wolf pups from their den and, having already shot their parents, then shot each of the pups in the head at close range. Last year, her administration offered a $150 bounty for each wolf killed until the bounty was ruled illegal by the courts. Hundreds of wolves are killed each year by this antiquated state program that has no scientific justification whatsoever, but rather is designed to appease Palin’s urban sport hunter supporters.

Pebble mine. Palin aggressively opposed the “clean water initiative” on the August ballot in Alaska (which then failed), favoring instead foreign mining company desires for fewer government regulations controlling their toxic effluent into salmon streams. She has supported virtually any and all mining proposals that have come her way, even likely the enormous Pebble gold and silver mine proposed in the Bristol Bay watershed. That plan put at risk the largest runs of sockeye salmon in the world, where this summer fishermen caught more than 27 million salmon.

Oil and gas drilling. Palin has supported oil and gas drilling plans anywhere in Alaska, including in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the central Arctic, the entire Arctic Ocean, and in fish-rich Bristol Bay and Cook Inlet. On her watch, regulation and government oversight of Alaska oil facilities is terribly lacking, and she has declined to establish a citizens’ advisory council to provide more effective public oversight of the expanding oil and gas operations in Arctic Alaska.

Exxon Valdez oil spill damages. Palin refuses to push Exxon to pay the government for the unanticipated environmental injuries from the disastrous 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill. Almost 20 years later, the private case is still unresolved and the governments likewise have yet to collect full payment from Exxon. Shortly before Palin took office in 2006, the governments presented Exxon with a demand to pay $92 million for this additional environmental damage, but her administration has since not pressed the issue nor taken Exxon to court to collect the money. Meanwhile, Exxon reaps record profits from Alaska.

Trans Pacific shipping. Palin repeatedly has been asked by coastal residents and organizations to enhance the safety of merchant shipping through Alaska’s Aleutian Islands, a primary shipping route between Asia and North America, but she’s done nothing. Citizens want better vessel tracking, powerful rescue tugs along the route and a risk assessment. While her
predecessor funded a scoping study, the Palin administration has not appropriated one dime to improve shipping safety through the Aleutians, and says it will take no further action to reduce risk for several years into the future.

The pattern is clear. On the environment, Sarah Palin is essentially George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and perhaps James Watt rolled into one, but with a more pleasant demeanor. At a time when the nation and world urgently need strong environmental leadership from the United States, it is important to look beyond charisma and carefully consider the environmental implications of our vote in November.

Rick Steiner is a professor at the University of Alaska.

© 1998-2008 Seattle Post-Intelligencer

You could have knocked me over with a fender!

The folks at GrizzlyBay.org have the straight poop (the kind that smells like pepper spray) on McCain’s pick for Vice President, proving that the art of gullibility is not yet dead.

Read it and Veep!

UN chief decries global warming

As if this were news…

I remember in the 70s my earth science professor telling us that agriculture had developed during a period of unusually stable climate, and that, some day, the climate would start shifting back to “normal,” that is, less stable and suitable for agriculture.

Looks like some day has arrived.

It’s only political inertia that has cast any doubt at all on the observations that global climate has been shifting at an increasing rate over the past 12,000 years. I observed it and an island in the Bering Strait, standing in the surf where archaeologist had been digging on dry land only thirty years before. I watched long lines of fence posts toppling over near Fairbanks, as melting permafrost shifted and heaved the ground. A huge hole appeared in my front yard, requiring several truck loads of sewage sludge to fill the space left over by melted permafrost.

It’s has been abundantly obvious that the planet is warming and subsequent changes are now and will continue to affect human society in increasingly dramatic disasters.

It’s Nature’s way.

Hayduke
Leona Gulch
Pacific Plate