Stop La Parota Dam

An important call to action from a dear friend…

The following is a press release put out by Root Force, Rising Tide North America, Arizona Earth First! and Justicia Global calling for boycotts and protests of CompUSA, Sears and Kmart due to their involvement with a planned hydroelectric dam in Mexico. Please read this and forward it to anyone who might be interested, whether because of an interest in Latin American solidarity, environmental defense, indigenous sovereignty, anti-globalization or other issues. This includes NGOs, NGO supporters, grassroots activists, friendly press, etc. If you are part of a group that is interested in signing on to the boycott, please email info@rootforce.org.

Activists Demand that CompUSA, Sears, Kmart End Involvement in Controversial Mexican Dam

Background information: www.rootforce.org

Public urged to protest and boycott retailers linked to Carlos Slim, investor in planned La Parota megadam

Human rights, indigenous sovereignty, environmental and anti-globalization activists are calling for protests and boycotts of three major US retail chains-CompUSA, Sears and Kmart-due to their involvement with plans for a hydroelectric dam that would displace tens of thousands of indigenous subsistence farmers in southern Mexico and destroy critical tropical forest ecosystems. A 2006 United Nations report listed the planned La Parota dam near Acapulco as Mexico’s top economic, social and cultural rights concern.

Endorsing the call are Root Force, Rising Tide North America, Arizona Earth First! and Florida-based Justicia Global.

“When consumers shop at these stores, their money goes directly to people who are profiting from violence and the destruction of threatened tropical forests,” said Ben Pachano of Root Force.

Mexican businessman Carlos Slim, who Forbes lists as the third richest person in the world, owns a number of companies that have publicly expressed interest in financing and building La Parota. Slim also owns CompUSA (a computer retail chain) and Sears Roebuck Mexico. The owner of the Sears brand-Sears Holdings Corporation-in turn owns Sears and Kmart in the United States.

“Sears Holdings Corporation is ultimately responsible for the behavior of anyone who is authorized to use the Sears name,” Pachano said. “By withdrawing his right to use that name, it can place substantial pressure on Slim to end his involvement in La Parota.”

Great controversy has arisen over the planned dam, primarily due to its anticipated effects on local indigenous communities. Road blockades and lawsuits by these communities have stalled the project, but the cost to locals has been high. Internal conflict fomented by the Mexican government has led to the deaths of at least six people, while others have been beaten and arrested by local and federal police. On January 6, Benito Jacinto Cruz, a farmer opposed to the dam, was shot and killed by assailants unknown.

La Parota dam has also drawn fire for its anticipated impacts on soil and water quality, a particular concern given its placement in the Sierra Madre del Sur mountain range-globally renowned for its high concentration of rare and endemic species. In addition, environmentalists are concerned that the dam would contribute to the pace of global warming. Studies have shown that dams in tropical regions actually produce from two to 40 times as much carbon dioxide as an equivalent coal plant (http://www.irn.org/programs/greenhouse/resemissions.html).

“Slim is gambling with the very future of our planet,” said Nina Williams of Rising Tide. “We hope shoppers of conscience will agree that no one should profit from that.”

Boycott organizers have stated that the campaign against CompUSA, Sears and Kmart will not end until Slim publicly guarantees that none of his companies will participate in the La Parota project in any capacity.

http://rootforce.org/dada/mail.cgi/u/announcements/

One Week

In one week I will be on a plane (really three planes) to visit a dear old friend in Hilo, HI, who is known to the blogosphere as petitpoussin.  I am totally excited and am already mentally packing my suitcase.

In one week I will have also done insane amounts of work, shopped for oragimi paper and beads, co-lead an intergenerational worship service on Making Peace, oriented parents of fourth and fifth graders to Our Whole Lives: Comprehensive Sexuality Education Program, and have attended an all day staff retreat at a dude ranch.  (’cause I really do live in Arizona).

In one week I will hopefully have fixed the perpetually there flat tire on my bicycle and done my laundry.

In one week the newest issue of the Earth First! Journal (where J. works and I volunteer) will be in the mail headed to subscribers and radical bookstores.

In one week I will have said good bye for another week to J. who I love very much.

In one week I will have attended a potluck, gone on a hike, auctioned off a bicycle at the Food Conspiracy Coop’s annual meeting, and seen Tucson’s 2007 production of The Vagina Monologues.

In one day it will be one year since my grandfather died. And I don’t really know what to do about that.  I miss you grandpa.  Thank you for so much.

Neruda’s “Keeping Quiet”

This past week there has been some a stream of Pablo Neruda poetry posts. I first read about this wonderful phenomenon over at Truly Outrageous. And Sylvia at the Anti-Essentialist Conundrum, who posted the first Neruda poem, has been tracking the Neruda craze.

I first discovered Neruda the summer I was 16, and am pleased to join in the Neruda blogging with:

A callarse / Keeping Quiet

Ahora contaremos doce
y nos quedamos todos quietos.

Por una vez sobre la tierra
no hablemos en ningún idioma,
por un segundo detengámonos,
no movamos tanto los brazos.

Sería un minuto fragante,
sin prisa, sin locomotoras,
todos estaríamos juntos
en una inquietud instantánea.

Los pescadores del mar frió
no harían daño a las ballenas
y el trabajador de la sal
miraría sus manos rotas.

Los que preparan guerras verdes,
guerras de gas, guerras de fuego,
victorias sin sobrevivientes,
se pondrían un traje puro
y andarían son sus hermanos
por la sombra, sin hacer nada.

No se confunda lo quiero
con la inacción definitiva:
la vida es solo lo que se hace,
no quiero nada con la muerte.

Si no pudimos ser unánimes
moviendo tanto nuestras vidas
tal vez no hacer nada una vez,
tal vez un gran silencio pueda
interrumpir esta tristeza,
este no entendernos jamás
y amenazarnos con la muerte,
tal vez la tierra nos enseñe
cuando todo parece muerto
y luego todo estaba vivo.

Ahora contare hasta doce
y tú te callas y me voy.

Keeping Quiet / A callarse

Now we will all count to twelve
and we will all keep still.

This one time upon the earth,
let’s not speak any language,
let’s stop for one second,
and not move our arms so much.

It would be a delicious moment,
without hurry, without locomotives,
all of us would be together
in a sudden uneasiness.

The fisherman in the cold sea
would do no harm to the whales
and the peasant gathering salt
would look at his torn hands.

Those who prepare green wars,
wars of gas, wars of fire,
victories without survivors,
would put on clean clothing
and would walk alongside their brothers
in the shade, without doing a thing.

What I want shouldn’t be confused
with final inactivity:
life alone is what matters,
I want nothing to do with death.

If we weren’t unanimous
about keeping our lives so much in motion,
if we could perhaps do nothing for once,
perhaps a great silence would interrupt this sadness,
this never understanding ourselves
and threatening ourselves with death,
perhaps the earth is teaching us
when everything seems to be dead
and everything is alive.

Now I will count to twelve
and you keep quiet and I’ll go.

-By Pablo Neruda
-Englsih translation by Stephen Mitchell

Vegan cupcakes take over my world

If you have been in communication with me over the last month you have probably noticed that I have been distracted by vegan cupcakes – making cupcakes, icing cupcakes, eating cupcakes, preparing ingredient shopping lists for cupcakes, and reading aloud from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World by Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero.

J. and I were given this wonderful book on New Years by friends in Philadelphia. That very night we discovered that cupcakes go very well with champagne. Since then I have made cupcakes for my youth group at church, cupcakes for friends and coworkers, and cupcakes for coffee hour. We’ve had dulce sin leche cupcakes, chocolate cupcakes with cookies and cream frosting, and vanilla cupcakes with lemon butter cream icing. Neighbors borrowed our new book and made chocolate stout cupcake, and I borrowed their pastry bag to have a go at the art of frosting cupcakes.

Joy was spread around the world.

This morning I was pleased to read an email from a friend with a link to the article Strict Vegan Ethics, Frosted With Hedonism, a delightful NY Times piece on Moskowitz and Romero and their forays into a world of vegan baking that is both pretty and punk.

A quick internet search shows that we are indeed in the midst of a cupcake movement. There are gourmet cupcake bakeries and cafes opening from New York and Beverly Hills to Chicago, Pittsburgh and Sydney. There are sophisticated cupcakes, arty cupcakes, wedding cupcakes and even cupcake lawsuits. And of course, there are cupcake blogs, including vegancupcakes.wordpress.com, which means that my new favorite book has a companion narrative unfolding online.

Now what does the current cupcake craze look like? Magnolia Bakery in NYC, which opened over 10 years ago, markets the old fashioned cupcake. Yet this dessert venue stays open late into the night and weekend customers often wait in a line wrapping around the block. Citizen Cupcake in San Francisco pairs their desserts with cocktails. Cupcakes are clearly no longer a mere birthday ritual confined to the assigned seating of elementary school.

In a 2004 interview, James Gray, a cupcake baker from Dozen Cupcakes in Pittsburgh stated, “A cupcake becomes a blank canvas and it can be anything you want it to be.”

So, how do you like your cupcakes? I, like the authors of Vegan Cupcakes like my single serving desserts to be vegan and delicious. While some of the cupcake bakeries, such as Dozen Cupcakes, do feature a few vegan options much of the current cupcake craze still seems to center around butter, cream and eggs (sometimes organic). With so much energy currently being put into cupcake choice as a statement of identity, and so much flavor, creativity and style available in vegan cupcakes, why not have more on the menu?

And now, I think there might be one more cupcake waiting for me in the kitchen.

Blogging for Choice

Today, on the 34th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, is National Blog for Choice Day. You link to other blogs writing on the topic here. You can also read some of my favorite posts on the topic here and here.

The pro-choice movement is obviously a complex phenomenon that encompasses issues of health, privacy, race, class, freedom, and more. I’m not about to tackle all of that right now. A lot of my recent thinking about the pro-choice movement comes from an interview with Katha Pollitt in the current issue of Bitch Magazine. Here’s some of what she has to say about (re)framing the abortion debate:

The pro-choicers have let the antis set the terms of the debate. We are on the defensive. We don’t say, Look, it’s okay for women to postpone motherhood to get an education, to get established at work, to find a mate, to grow up. It’s okay to only want one child. In fact, it’s okay not to want children at all. Instead we defend abortion by emphasizing extreme cases – rape, incest, dangerous pregnancies, anencephalic fetuses – and we defend the moral agency of women who choose abortion by talking about what a difficult, serious tragic decision it is. And sometimes that is true. But sometimes abortion is an easy decision. (See how cold and frivolous that sounds? You’re not supposed to talk like that!) If you are not ambivalent about the pregnancy you might not feel so sad.

I present you with this quote to highlight what I hope is obvious: there is not one monolithic narrative to the pro-choice movement, nor is there one archetypal experience for women who have had abortions.