Limits of Market Action

I've just started reading this article on the restoration of some wetland area in my home state of Illinois: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/23/AR2007062300611.html
and I got to wondering how far the whole "It pays to be Green" idea can go. Surely, there has to come a point when the market will not tolerate anymore greening, provided that greening is authentic, i.e. conserves nature in sustainable ways. I suppose I'm thinking of the market-nature relationship in antagonistic ways-perhaps Marxist-but history has thus far proven the relationship is indirect: economy improves as capital grows, which means the environment (and the rest of us) pays the price via externalized pollution and resource depletion.

But there is low-hanging fruit to be had. Perhaps people/companies (grrrr...) can make money by greening what was once degraded by rapacious greed that is capitalistic behavior. Will such greening at the hands of those corporations responsible for the degradation in the first place be actual greening? Should we trust 'em? Will we fall into a new dogmatic paradigm and continue with the same earth-killing behaviors so long as we're greening someplace, somewhere?

Schools and Cleaning Fluid

Here are a couple of thoughts I had a few weeks back-still relevant-that I haven't posted till now:

I was riding my bike down St. Claude into the French Quarter. Maybe I was going downtown but what I saw that broke my heart was blocks away from the French Quarter before St. Claude becomes North Rampart. I saw a sign on an abandoned school saying “School Starts Aug. 28, 2005.” Of course school never started then for Louisiana students. Some had left, some without any options had to stay and some were probably housed in the Superdome for days after the flood. The sign hadn’t been changed since then, and doubtless the building hadn’t been occupied for schooling since the spring of 2005. In the Lower Ninth Ward, school is something noticeably absent for the exiled community. Homes of course are still non-existent, but schools seem to be the lynchpin of the community, along with the churches. Youth are also precariously absent from the Lower Ninth, and hence the future is nowhere in sight here.

As a former teacher, and as a critic of education and schooling in general, I remain a skeptic of ideas that school will elevate a populace, or will have any advantages for a people displaced and scattered. After all, doesn’t school just teach the poor how to live with being poor, the worker how to take orders, the middle class how to be obedient for certain rewards? Though I was told once that school in the South, in particular the Black South, had a different character than that which grew out of the Northeast tradition. There education was thought of as a means of liberation, whereby the oppressed could learn and thereby transcend the position they were born into. As long as it was controlled by the liberated still reaching for freedom themselves, and taught by the liberated I believe it could have been a sight of progress. As bell hooks wrote about her experience in a black school, thought and subversion were apart of what she loved about school. Still I believe the system has gotten very good at absorbing and transforming that which is Other, or revolutionary, or unique, into something which is upholding of the status quo-that which is part of the system. So with school, that which was meant to elevate those who were slaves or those who were lower class became a tool to indoctrinate the populace into preparing them for the roles they were meant to play.

What can I say about schools in New Orleans then? There is little reason for a family to return if their children can’t be educated. It is sad to see the schools so empty, even if I have attached the notion of children with schools. Children are the future, they are the hope. They are a reason to come home, and their absence here, though not total-decideds the future of this town.

Models for Self-Sufficiency

Youth Business Opportunities and Small Loans to Minority Businesses.

We have to be looking at economic models for gainful employment of youth of color and people of color generally. If Halle Barrie's character in "Bullworth" was right, as I believe she was, that it was the jobs in the black community after the second world war that provided the stimulus for the civil rights movement and the black power movement after that, then we must focus energies on building, or re-building the economic base of the black community.

The simple idea that black business should be providing services and products to the black communities is not the way it is right now. Would micro-credit be a solution to this? Maybe but it also has it's problems as an economic model.

But the Toxic Soil Busters are an interesting example of a youth-run business that is cleaning up the town of Worchester-literally. By educating citiznery on the problem of lead in the soil and remediating the soil, these youth are making a viable business that could be patterned after in other cities.

Update: Been So Long

A quick update of my experiences in New Orleans. I've been working so much, it's been hard to sit down and write. Even now, I'm supposed to be working with a resident of St.Bernard Parish on a citizen group and their fight to hold Murphy's Oil accountable for their environmental degradation. Yes, well then. Let's begin.

-Two weeks ago we went to protest the commemoration of the opening of the Desire projects in the Lower Ninth Ward. Mayor Ray Nagin was their speaking on the glorious return of residents to the city and to the progress being made. But we were there to remind the audience (and TV cameras apparently) that the contractors who had built those projects had violated federal law by NOT using local workers in the rebuilding process of a disaster area, and instead used illegal immigrants so as to further disenfranchise the local pool of unemployed and at the same time exploit cheap labor-as a side benefit, the black and brown are vying for the same jobs, and so less likely to see their plight as coinciding.

In addition, the Desire Project is going to be mixed-income, which means that some residents of the project, most being low-income, will not be moving back to their houses. And if history is an example, 'mixed-income' is short for 'soon to be middle-income,' much like the experience with the St. Charles Project.

So this is-in brief outline-is how New Orleans is going to rebuild. For mixed-income residents, by illegal immigrants, and of the powerful interests/politicians. Not too sustainable.

-This past week we planted Tall Cut Grass in the Blind River. Tall because the grass is tall-can reach 10 feet; Cut Grass because the edges of the thick grass blade can and did cut our hands; Blind River because, well, I don't know the Blind part, but it was a river. This might strike some as interesting because we are after all doing a wetland planting and rivers aren't wetlands. But actually, right next to the flowing river was stagnant water that abutted the banks. And as we were tramping along the muck in these small wetlands, we would disturb the methane in the anaerobic soils and cause bubbles of methane to float to the top. We added to Global Warming true, but we did plant 800 pots of Cut Grass, with each pot having ~5 grasses.

Hopefully the Nutria, an invasive rat species that ate all the live oak samplings that we planted about two months ago, will leave the Cut Grass the hell alone!

One note about the location of the planting. The Blind River seemed to have some very expensive homes on its shores. Those lots with the expensive homes didn't have any wetland plants to secure the shorebanks, which is why we were there planting. This brings up the question of what were we there to save? The shore banks? For whom? For rich people who didn't want to help preserve the banks themselves?

I think the Wetlands group might be a little more discriminating in the places we are going to do replanting. Avoiding Nutria (curses!) and finding locations that are more likely to benefit from added plants.

Another question: Are rich people alienated from the environment by definition?

-We also met with a group from Univ of Wisconsin this week. They want to make sure that their names are NOT included on any of our literature. They want to do a study on the feasibility of a wastewater assimilation project in the Cypress Triangle. The CT abuts the Lower Ninth Ward to the North--I've written about it before. But their projects will determine if putting secondarily treated wastewater in the CT will help bring back the Cypress Forest that once flourished but has since been diminished by the salt water intrusion.

The project would provide freshwater (not saltwater) to Cypress as well as the Nitrogen and Phosphorus that is available in wastewater. The wastewater would be treated a third time by having those nutrients removed, and the city doesn't have to pay for that remediation. In the long the Lower Ninth Ward would benefit from having a living Cypress Forest to hold back the full force of hurricane storms. Winners all around. It sounds like a very good project, and I hope the study proves positive. I asked the students from Univ of Wisconsin who DO NOT want their names on any of our literature if they had given any thought to the idea that once a beautiful Cypress Forest is brought back to the CT, then housing prices might rise and force residents to leave--basically environmental remediation as impetus to gentrify. They hadn't considered that in their feasibility study. But maybe now it's on their radar. I certainly don't know how to address that conundrum.

Website Ideas

Here are some website ideas I've been thinking about:

Threat of an Example.com
-good examples of living apart from the system

Broken Promises.com
-record of what the politicians say and the results

What they Mean.com
-what they mean when saying a word
-what is actually meant in the real world when saying the same thing
-what the word should mean

Update

So the Senate and the House have given the Army Corps the go ahead to close the Mississippi Riveer Gulf Outlet, the 76-mile canal that has been a really awful project for New Orleans since it's creation in 1965. It's destroyed hundreds of acres of wetlands, cost taxpayers up the whazoo, helped Katrina destroy the Lower Ninth and St. Bernard in its own right, and indirectly (wetlands destrution) and not even been economically profitable for the powers that be.

Most likely, the last one is the reason it's being closed. I heard Lyndon Johnson's family bought up all the wetlands in St. Bernard Parish after Hurrican ripped through in 1965, and it was Johnson himself that built MRGO to provide a more direct route for ships to the Gulf from New Orleans.