Just say no to animal circuses in Minneapolis

Written by Kerry Ashmore

Posted 7/25/2007

Numerous thorny issues cloud the debate over how humans treat animals. One issue coming quickly to Minneapolis, however, has a clear and easy correct answer. We urge Minneapolis City Council members to ban wild animal circus performances in the city. This will not require all of us to become vegetarians. It won’t ban laboratory research. It won’t be a death sentence for any animal that bites a human. Minneapolis taxpayers would simply be refusing to allow people to make money in the city through capturing and training wild animals, and would be foregoing any money the city and local businesses might make if the circus came to town. This issue is similar to some other thorny issues, however, in that many people will oppose the ban because they don’t want to believe that circuses are necessarily cruel to animals. To support the ban, they would have to admit that the whole concept of capturing and training wild animals for human entertainment and enrichment is, and always has been, wrong; and that they have been wrong for not doing everything they could to ban the practice decades ago. Who wants to admit to something like that? Our advice to them: Deal with it. Yes, we humans have been wrong all along, and this is a baby step toward making things right. Those who don’t want the ban will be quick to point to violent and illegal acts people have committed in the name of ending animal cruelty, and suggest that seeking to end animal cruelty somehow indicates that one condones such acts. That simply doesn’t pass the common sense test, and those who bring such incidents into the discussion are essentially admitting that they can’t come up with a reasonable defense for the way animals are treated in a circus setting. This shouldn’t come as a surprise, because there is no reasonable defense for it. Some local people will lose some money if the ban is passed. Circus people stay in local hotels, eat in local restaurants and spend money in local stores. Our wise and resourceful officials can replace the circus with other events that don’t cause us to support unconscionable acts toward beings who, because of human intervention, are no longer able to defend themselves. Humans, with complete freedom of movement and superior reasoning capability, grow weary of "life on the road," and with good reason. Circus animals are caged and moved from town to town, forced to perform unnatural acts and then caged and moved to yet another town for yet another performance. The best efforts of the most kind-hearted people in the world cannot make this process humane. It is cruel by its nature. It’s unlikely that the circus people think that what they’re doing is inhumane. It’s only when city after city after city closes its doors that they will ask, "Why?" and perhaps begin to have second thoughts about the way animals have to be treated if they are to provide money-making entertainment to humans. When and if our society becomes truly civilized, such entertainment will be banned entirely. Those animal-protection laws don’t exist now, and there isn’t a legal way to stop circus use of animals. Minneapolis, however, has a chance to take one simple, straightforward action, and become the 29th American city to close its doors to wild animal circuses. It’s an action Minneapolis council members should take without delay, without regret and without dissent. source: http://nenorthnews.com/Opinion.asp?view=574&paperID=1&month=

Green Movement primarily white

The New Environmentalists: How to Make the Green Movement Less White

By Van Jones, ColorLines
Posted on August 7, 2007, Printed on August 8, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/58613/

In response to mounting ecological crises, the United States is going through its most important economic transformation since the New Deal. Unfortunately, the vital process of change along more eco-friendly lines is moving ahead with practically zero participation from people of color.

Hundreds of mayors and several governors are bucking the Bush administration and committing themselves to the carbon-cutting principles of the Kyoto treaty on climate change. The U.S. Congress is debating an energy bill this year that could be a watershed for alternative energy sources.

What's more, regular people are way ahead of these leaders. U.S polls show super-majorities want strong action on the climate crisis and other environmental perils. And consumers are reshaping markets by demanding hybrid cars, bio-fuels, solar panels, organic food and more. As a result, the "lifestyles of health and sustainability" sector of the U.S. economy has ballooned into a $240 billion gold mine. And total sales are growing on a near-vertical axis.

The Economist magazine calls it "The Greening of America." Indeed, we are witnessing the slow death of the Earth-devouring, suicidal version of capitalism. We're even seeing the birth of some form of "eco-capitalism." To be sure, a more "ecologically sound" market system will not be a utopia. But at least it will buy our species a few extra decades or centuries on this planet.

That's the good news. Here is the bad news.

The celebrated "lifestyles" sector is probably the most racially segregated part of the U.S. economy; at present, it is almost exclusively the province of affluent white people. Few entrepreneurs of color are positioned to reap the benefits of the government's push to green the economy.

We are seeing a major debate about the direction of the U.S. economy -- in which communities of color apparently have nothing to say. Our near-silence on such key issues has no precedent, at least not since before the Civil War.

How can this be? Black, Latino, Asian and Native American communities suffer the most from the environmental ills of our industrial society. Our folks desperately need the new economic activity, investments and opportunities that this major transition is beginning to generate.

To put it bluntly, people of color have much more directly at stake in the greening of America than white college students do. Why are they marching for carbon caps, while most of us just yawn and change the channel?

When these new formations and networks emerge, all racial justice activists will become, in some sense, environmental justice activists.

More people of color have not yet grabbed the microphone for three reasons: our long-standing pattern of viewing environmental issues as luxury concerns; the mainstream media's "whites only" coverage of the green phenomenon; and serious structural impediments to action within the racial justice movement itself.

First of all, too often we have said: "We are overwhelmed with violence, bad housing, failing schools, excessive incarceration, poor healthcare and joblessness. We can't afford to worry about spotted owls, redwood trees and polar bears."

But Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath taught us that the coming ecological disasters will hit the poor first and worst. More of us are beginning to see that there can be no separation between our concern for vulnerable people and our concern for a vulnerable planet.

Secondly, any U.S. magazine's "Special Green Issue" typically will not show many people of color, despite the incredible achievements of numerous environmentalists of color across the country. Many racial justice activists see this kind of coverage, shrug our shoulders and understandably assume that green equals white.

But this is a mistake. When did we start trusting the corporate media to fairly calculate our interests in any major topic or development in U.S. society? When have our activists and advocates ever accepted their frame and parameters in determining what is important or what we should do? It should not surprise anyone that the mainstream media does not reflect our deep and profound interests in the greening of the economy. And it is high time for us to make our own assessment and create our own strategy for shaping the process in accordance with our interests.

Finally, at least among committed activists, there is a deeper reason that we have not mobilized at the appropriate scale. And that reason can be found within the structure of our racial justice movement itself. Our present deployment of resources simply does not let us meet the challenges and opportunities that the green revolution is generating, simply because it is nobody's job to take them on.

Because no racial justice organization can tackle every issue and champion every cause, our groups have evolved a fairly strict division of labor. A single organization will ordinarily focus on just one issue -- criminal justice, immigrant rights, economic justice, violence prevention, educational equity, school reform, reproductive justice, what have you. Out of deference to each other (and to stay within funders' guidelines), our organizations bend over backwards to keep within their chosen issue areas and to stay off each other's "turfs."

One important issue area is called "environmental justice." The environmental justice movement emerged in the 1980s to challenge toxic pollution in the neighborhoods of low-income people and people of color. Made up of hundreds of mostly small, tough and scrappy organizations, this movement has won many local and national victories over the past two decades. The "EJ" movement's (often pint-sized) dynamos have shut down scofflaw polluters, power plants and incinerators. They have cut toxic emissions and improved public health in innumerable communities. And their leaders have elevated the concept of "environmental racism" to mainstream prominence.

Because of this movement's success and visibility, most racial justice activists today presume that anything related to the environment falls under the purview of our existing environmental justice organizations. Therefore when we hear all this "green talk," we tend to either assume it doesn't have anything to do with our communities or that someone else already has the mandate and the capacity to deal with it. This assumption is another reason that other racial justice leaders tend to ignore "all of this green stuff."

Well, such an approach might have served us in years past, but not today.

Today's environmental justice movement was designed to protect our interests in a toxic, pollution-based economy. It was not designed to promote our interests in a mushrooming, $250 billion green economy. Nor was any other racial justice movement or network. It is wildly unrealistic to assume that the already over-stretched and under-funded EJ groups can somehow meet this colossal, historic challenge on their own. It is unfair to expect them to do so.

So we stand now at the dawn of a new economy. But no part of the racial justice movement is charged with the task of ensuring that the new laws and new industries do right by low-income people and people of color.

We must change this. If we do not get involved, we will end up with eco-apartheid -- a society with ecological haves and have-nots. Imagine a world in which wealthy people have clean air, fresh water, healthy food and no-cost energy, thanks to solar panels, organic agriculture and green technology. Meanwhile, poor neighborhoods continue to choke in the fumes of the last century's pollution-based industries.

To put it bluntly, people of color have much more directly at stake in the greening of America than white college students do.

We must say no to a future in which our peoples get hit "first and worst" by the coming ecological catastrophes and benefit "last and least" from the emerging ecological advances.

This next environmental revolution -- call it the "Green for All" revolution -- will require especially sophisticated and skilled leadership.

We will have to continue to fight corporate polluters. And we would also be wise to consider and explore partnerships with eco-capitalists, who are willing to grow their businesses in a cleaner and greener way. We will continue saying no to the economic oppression of the dying economy. But we must also learn how to say "yes" to economic opportunity of the emerging economy. As a part of a new economic strategy, we should help interested communities and workers to create their own green collectives and co-ops (as did the Green Workers' Cooperative in the South Bronx).

We will continue fighting for equal protection from the worst of the pollution-based economy. And we will also add demands for equal access and equal opportunity in the clean and green economy.

We will also need tighter formations -- united fronts that can work explicitly for racial justice and inclusion. These networks and coalitions will advance independent slogans, such as Majora Carter's demand to "green the ghetto" or the Ella Baker Center's call for "green-collar jobs, not jails" for urban youth. And they will be more comfortable for many people of color than many of the present "green wave" spaces.

When these new formations and networks emerge, all racial justice activists will become, in some sense, environmental justice activists. But by that point, the environmental justice movement itself will be transformed into a massive movement, focused on a new paradigm of economic development, fighting to birth a green economy that is strong enough to lift people out of poverty.

Van Jones is executive director of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights in Oakland, California.

© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/58613/

Bridge Collapse underscores poor transit and road funding

Dear Blog Reader,

Those of us working with Transit for Livable Communities are thinking about the transportation system all the time. Can everyone in our community get where they need to go? Can the system handle the upcoming population growth in the next decades? Does transportation make our communities healthier, safer, and more prosperous? The 35W bridge collapse is a dark time for transportation in our state, but it has also been a reminder of how heroic things can happen when we face a crisis together. We believe this crisis is an opportunity to bring Minnesotans together for a long-term, balanced solution for our transportation problems.

The bridge collapse has shaken us, as we assume it did all Minnesotans. It has raised many questions about how so much destruction, disruption, and personal loss could be caused by flaws in a system so many of us take for granted. In the last week, we've talked a lot about how to honor the losses caused by the bridge collapse, and to also move forward with our commitment to a safer, more reliable, more effective transportation system. As our state begins to look to the future, there will be decisions about the redesign of the bridge and the possibility of passing a transportation funding bill this fall. These issues naturally raise questions about balance and whether our responses will be focused on the short term or a long term solution.

We believe we can, as a community, learn from this tragedy. At TLC, we also know we need to recommit to the values on which our organization was founded:

• We must invest in our communities, including transportation, to preserve our economic, environmental, and human health and our quality of life;
• We must commit to maintain the transportation investments we make and to provide reliable service and maintenance for transit, roads, and bridges, even during economic downturns;
• We must provide transportation choices throughout our communities, so that everyone can get where they need to go, and no one part of the system becomes overburdened;
• We must recognize our regional connections and plan for the future health of our transportation system, which will look different than it does today;
• We must focus our priorities on people, not just cars, and the personal impacts of the transportation system - our safety, time with our families, the air we breathe.

Transit for Livable Communities was founded to refocus transportation priorities toward people by helping more people participate in transportation and development decisions. We hope you'll continue to work with us to increase transportation choices, bring balance to the system, and increase transit, bike, and pedestrian investments.

We look forward to working together toward this shared future. Let us know if you want to know more about our work or want to get more involved.

Lea Schuster
Executive Director, Transit for Livable Communities

P.S. We join Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak in encouraging people across the metro to bike, walk, or take transit to destinations in or near the city. While alternatives to driving are crucial to keeping our metropolitan region functioning at any time, the bridge collapse reminds us how they can be particularly important in times of crisis.

Metro Transit: www.metrotransit.org

City of Minneapolis: www.ci.minneapolis.mn.us

Downtown Minneapolis Transportation Management Organization: www.mplstmo.org

The New Environmentalists: How to Make the Green Movement Less White

By Van Jones, ColorLines

In response to mounting ecological crises, the United States is going through its most important economic transformation since the New Deal. Unfortunately, the vital process of change along more eco-friendly lines is moving ahead with practically zero participation from people of color.

Hundreds of mayors and several governors are bucking the Bush administration and committing themselves to the carbon-cutting principles of the Kyoto treaty on climate change. The U.S. Congress is debating an energy bill this year that could be a watershed for alternative energy sources.

What's more, regular people are way ahead of these leaders. U.S polls show super-majorities want strong action on the climate crisis and other environmental perils. And consumers are reshaping markets by demanding hybrid cars, bio-fuels, solar panels, organic food and more. As a result, the "lifestyles of health and sustainability" sector of the U.S. economy has ballooned into a $240 billion gold mine. And total sales are growing on a near-vertical axis.

The Economist magazine calls it "The Greening of America." Indeed, we are witnessing the slow death of the Earth-devouring, suicidal version of capitalism. We're even seeing the birth of some form of "eco-capitalism." To be sure, a more "ecologically sound" market system will not be a utopia. But at least it will buy our species a few extra decades or centuries on this planet.

That's the good news. Here is the bad news.

The celebrated "lifestyles" sector is probably the most racially segregated part of the U.S. economy; at present, it is almost exclusively the province of affluent white people. Few entrepreneurs of color are positioned to reap the benefits of the government's push to green the economy.

We are seeing a major debate about the direction of the U.S. economy -- in which communities of color apparently have nothing to say. Our near-silence on such key issues has no precedent, at least not since before the Civil War.

How can this be? Black, Latino, Asian and Native American communities suffer the most from the environmental ills of our industrial society. Our folks desperately need the new economic activity, investments and opportunities that this major transition is beginning to generate.

To put it bluntly, people of color have much more directly at stake in the greening of America than white college students do. Why are they marching for carbon caps, while most of us just yawn and change the channel?

When these new formations and networks emerge, all racial justice activists will become, in some sense, environmental justice activists.

More people of color have not yet grabbed the microphone for three reasons: our long-standing pattern of viewing environmental issues as luxury concerns; the mainstream media's "whites only" coverage of the green phenomenon; and serious structural impediments to action within the racial justice movement itself.

First of all, too often we have said: "We are overwhelmed with violence, bad housing, failing schools, excessive incarceration, poor healthcare and joblessness. We can't afford to worry about spotted owls, redwood trees and polar bears."

But Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath taught us that the coming ecological disasters will hit the poor first and worst. More of us are beginning to see that there can be no separation between our concern for vulnerable people and our concern for a vulnerable planet.

Secondly, any U.S. magazine's "Special Green Issue" typically will not show many people of color, despite the incredible achievements of numerous environmentalists of color across the country. Many racial justice activists see this kind of coverage, shrug our shoulders and understandably assume that green equals white.

But this is a mistake. When did we start trusting the corporate media to fairly calculate our interests in any major topic or development in U.S. society? When have our activists and advocates ever accepted their frame and parameters in determining what is important or what we should do? It should not surprise anyone that the mainstream media does not reflect our deep and profound interests in the greening of the economy. And it is high time for us to make our own assessment and create our own strategy for shaping the process in accordance with our interests.

Finally, at least among committed activists, there is a deeper reason that we have not mobilized at the appropriate scale. And that reason can be found within the structure of our racial justice movement itself. Our present deployment of resources simply does not let us meet the challenges and opportunities that the green revolution is generating, simply because it is nobody's job to take them on.

Because no racial justice organization can tackle every issue and champion every cause, our groups have evolved a fairly strict division of labor. A single organization will ordinarily focus on just one issue -- criminal justice, immigrant rights, economic justice, violence prevention, educational equity, school reform, reproductive justice, what have you. Out of deference to each other (and to stay within funders' guidelines), our organizations bend over backwards to keep within their chosen issue areas and to stay off each other's "turfs."

One important issue area is called "environmental justice." The environmental justice movement emerged in the 1980s to challenge toxic pollution in the neighborhoods of low-income people and people of color. Made up of hundreds of mostly small, tough and scrappy organizations, this movement has won many local and national victories over the past two decades. The "EJ" movement's (often pint-sized) dynamos have shut down scofflaw polluters, power plants and incinerators. They have cut toxic emissions and improved public health in innumerable communities. And their leaders have elevated the concept of "environmental racism" to mainstream prominence.

Because of this movement's success and visibility, most racial justice activists today presume that anything related to the environment falls under the purview of our existing environmental justice organizations. Therefore when we hear all this "green talk," we tend to either assume it doesn't have anything to do with our communities or that someone else already has the mandate and the capacity to deal with it. This assumption is another reason that other racial justice leaders tend to ignore "all of this green stuff."

Well, such an approach might have served us in years past, but not today.

Today's environmental justice movement was designed to protect our interests in a toxic, pollution-based economy. It was not designed to promote our interests in a mushrooming, $250 billion green economy. Nor was any other racial justice movement or network. It is wildly unrealistic to assume that the already over-stretched and under-funded EJ groups can somehow meet this colossal, historic challenge on their own. It is unfair to expect them to do so.

So we stand now at the dawn of a new economy. But no part of the racial justice movement is charged with the task of ensuring that the new laws and new industries do right by low-income people and people of color.

We must change this. If we do not get involved, we will end up with eco-apartheid -- a society with ecological haves and have-nots. Imagine a world in which wealthy people have clean air, fresh water, healthy food and no-cost energy, thanks to solar panels, organic agriculture and green technology. Meanwhile, poor neighborhoods continue to choke in the fumes of the last century's pollution-based industries.

To put it bluntly, people of color have much more directly at stake in the greening of America than white college students do.

We must say no to a future in which our peoples get hit "first and worst" by the coming ecological catastrophes and benefit "last and least" from the emerging ecological advances.

This next environmental revolution -- call it the "Green for All" revolution -- will require especially sophisticated and skilled leadership.

We will have to continue to fight corporate polluters. And we would also be wise to consider and explore partnerships with eco-capitalists, who are willing to grow their businesses in a cleaner and greener way. We will continue saying no to the economic oppression of the dying economy. But we must also learn how to say "yes" to economic opportunity of the emerging economy. As a part of a new economic strategy, we should help interested communities and workers to create their own green collectives and co-ops (as did the Green Workers' Cooperative in the South Bronx).

We will continue fighting for equal protection from the worst of the pollution-based economy. And we will also add demands for equal access and equal opportunity in the clean and green economy.

We will also need tighter formations -- united fronts that can work explicitly for racial justice and inclusion. These networks and coalitions will advance independent slogans, such as Majora Carter's demand to "green the ghetto" or the Ella Baker Center's call for "green-collar jobs, not jails" for urban youth. And they will be more comfortable for many people of color than many of the present "green wave" spaces.

When these new formations and networks emerge, all racial justice activists will become, in some sense, environmental justice activists. But by that point, the environmental justice movement itself will be transformed into a massive movement, focused on a new paradigm of economic development, fighting to birth a green economy that is strong enough to lift people out of poverty.

Van Jones is executive director of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights in Oakland, California.

© 2008 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/58613/

Minnesota Green Party Response to I-35W Bridge Tragedy

The Green Party of Minnesota offers its condolences and shares in the grief of the many personally affected by the I-35W bridge collapse tragedy on August 1st. We are especially grateful for the heroic efforts made by fellow citizens and rescue workers who assisted those directly affected.

It is unfortunate that it takes a tragedy such as this to generate a reaction to our failing infrastructure in this country. Ralph Nader, the 2000 presidential candidate for the Green Party, has been addressing this concern for more than a decade. On July 27, 1999 he wrote an article in the Los Angeles Times entitled "Perspective on Federal Spending." In it he stated: "The debate over how to allocate funds must include how best to improve our great shared assets." His proactive opinions on protecting our country and its infrastructure along with our democracy have continuously been shut out from the mainstream debate, while the majority of our federal taxes are spent on an illegal and severely destructive war.

Hopefully, out of the tears and grief will come the appropriate investigations and necessary funds to prevent future infrastructure tragedies. We also hope that replacement, where needed, will include building along more environmentally friendly lines.