AGR talks with deep ecologist John Seed

By Mary Giovanniello

John Seed is founder and director of the Rainforest Information Centre in Australia. Since 1979, he has been involved in direct actions which have resulted in the protection of the Australian rainforests. He interviewed with the AGR while on his way to Asheville to help raise money to protect rainforests in Ecuador.

AGR: Was there a turning point in your life when you suddenly became aware of issues threatening our planets rainforests?

JOHN SEED: Yeah, there was for me it took place in very specifically actually in 1979 in August. I had been living for about five years in a back to the land community in Northern New South Wales in Australia ,and as an aside I must say that Asheville socially, of any place in the US or perhaps the world that I know of is more like this area of Northern New South Wales. So your readers will probably be very aware of the kind of life we lived there. I’d been living in this community building our own houses growing our own food delivering our own babies for some years when neighbors appealed for help. They had been trying to prevent the logging of rainforest at the end of this valley which as it happens was only about four miles from where I’d been living all those years but I didn’t even know it existed. Somehow, just to support this plea from my neighbors, I found myself at what turned out in retrospect to be the first direct action in defense of rain forests anywhere in the world. It was August 1979 at a place called Terania Creek. Something happened to me there that I can’t really describe in words except that my whole life turned around and within a year I was no longer really taking part in the activities of the community. I’d started the Rainforest Information Center and I was working on what I’ve been doing ever since, working for the forests. I felt that I could hear the forests calling me and I was able to respond to that call.

AGR: Since you equated the Asheville area to the rainforest area there, do you have any advice for people as far as communities here that are working to fight the strip mining that is coming into the area again? They want to do complete mountain top removal, strip mining and logging of whole regions of the Appalachians .

JS: Of course it is hard to give advice to people in situations that I don’t know too much about but I guess what I could say is that when you work to support nature that nature will always support you. It is really important no matter how busy with our activism we are to just give time for that renewal in nature. When people are looking for some sort of empowerment to defend the earth, to just leave time for the earth to give us that empowerment…Nature is calling out for us to support her in this way and we should make ourselves available to receive the refreshment, renewal and nourishment that nature can give us for this work.

AGR: Can you briefly describe ecopsychology?

JS :Ecopsychology is a way of looking at our relationship with nature. Basically the psychological underpinnings of the dominant paradigm that’s involved in the strip mining and the despoiling of the earth, the destruction of nature, forests, species and so on is based upon a kind of complete misunderstanding of who we are. Paul Erlich, a famous ecologist from California, said we’re sawing off the branch we’re sitting on, you know? This would indicate some sort of psychological problem. Ecopyschology looks at the psychological aspect of this foolishness. How can we possibly think that we could profit from unraveling the biological fabric out of which we ourselves and our lives are woven. To give you another example, a famous British scientist James Lovelock, who popularized the Gaia theory (Gaia is the name of the ancient greek goddess of the earth) said that what we are doing to the earth is as if the brain were to decide it were the most important organ in the body and started mining the liver, so a brain that behaved in this way would not be understanding it’s part of the same body as the liver. The brain thinks that it can somehow profit from this but of course it can’t. Ecopsychology is saying that we can’t really solve the environmental problems just on their own terms that we also have to understand the psychology that is behind it and that if could heal the illusion of separation from nature that is driving all of this destruction then we wouldn’t have to be fighting this one forest fire at a time. Basically it’s based on a sort of mental illness and if we could somehow get to the root of this mental illness then we wouldn’t have to be confronted with one aberration after another.

AGR: How do you feel direct action now fits into your work and have your feelings on direct action changed over the years ?

JS: No, not at all direct action is were I started and only last year I was arrested chained to a logging machine in Northern New South Wales. I feel that direct action is one of the tried and true tested ways and that it has achieved a tremendous amount. But of course, by itself, it is not sufficient. It needs to be accompanied by political action,education and many other things.But I feel that those other things lack a real kind of powerful motor and that direct action is really important as a way of letting people know what is going on.

AGR : How do you feel poverty ties into the destruction of the earth’s rainforests?

JS: There is no way that we can solve the ecological problems that are facing the earth without addressing the social problems as well .People that don’t know where their next meal is coming from are not going to be too interested in learning about ecology and we can not expect people like that to make sacrifices.We might want the people in Ecuador, for example, to stop slashing and burning the forests but unless we can somehow provide them with the education and the tools to practice a sustainable agriculture that doesn’t require them to do this, then we can’t really blame them for the things that they are doing.That is why as well as the direct actions and the kinds of political actions that I and my friends and colleges at the Rainforest Information Center are involved with is also very much creating benign ,sustainable alternatives for the poorest people who live in and around the rainforests .

AGR: Do you feel like this leads into other issues of were people are putting their energy being profit and not the sustainability of our planet?

JS: ….As long as people feel isolated and alone and separate from nature, community, and each other then there is a kind of a hunger there that advertising……is trying to tell us we are going to be able to assuage that hunger by material goods ,that we are going to be able to shop our way out of this terrible feeling, but in fact it never works. You never meet any one that has come to the end of that and says now I have enough…..I guess that is another reason why I do deep ecology, experiental workshops because I hope this is a way of allowing that sense of emptiness that leads to all of this consumption to subside and begin to allow us the space to begin to work for the larger picture…..

AGR:Can you tell us about your upcoming trip to Asheville?

JS:On next Thursday night at The Jubilee Center there will be a rainforest benefit concert and I’ll be showing a very important video about an oil pipeline in Ecuador that is destroying the Amazon headwaters. I will be letting people know how we can change all of that and talking about ecopsychology and deep ecology. I am also a musician so I’ll be singing a few songs .Then over the weekend we will be at Earth Haven doing an ecopsychology workshop beginning at 4:30 on Friday. It will include a council of all beings as well as various processes but all of them with the same design and intention which is to dispel the illusion of separation….The facilitators fees go entirely towards the conservation of nature in this case to the conservation of rainforests in Ecuador.



AGR: Do you have anything you would like to say for future generations, or about what you feel to be the future of the rainforest?

JS: What motivates me is the realization that the rainforests are the womb of life. They are home to half of the worlds species of plants and animals .Satellite pictures show us they are disappearing at such a tremendous rate that after hundreds of millions of years of being the genetic treasure house of the world less than a single human lifetime remains. Every rainforest in the world that isn’t specifically and strongly protected will be gone from the earth .When I think of that I get this incredible sense of occasion as if what on earth could possibly be more important for me than to make room in my life to be able to address this situation.

The WNC AIDS Project

By Liz Allen

Sept. 10 (AGR) – In 1986 the Western North Carolina AIDS Project (WNCAP) was established to address the need and concern, originally expressed by the gay community, for the care and prevention of AIDS. The organization provides disease prevention education and assists those on the Western North Carolina area effected by HIV or AIDS. All services provided are free and confidential.

The mission of the client services is “To help people affected by HIV/AIDS achieve the best quality of life possible.” There are six case managers on staff at WNCAP, who handle between 50 and 52 cases a month and 270 and 320 people in a year. This month alone they had 11 new intakes. The program provides financial assistance, specialized assistance with government aid forms, and practical and emotional support. Also included is LEAPS, a client-led empowerment program.

According to preliminary data released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention there were 42,136 AIDS cases in the United States in 2002. As defined by the Congressional Black Congress Foundation, “AIDS stands for Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome and is caused by the Human Immunodifiency Virus (HIV). By killing or impairing cells of the immune system, HIV progressively destroys the body’s ability to fight infections and certain cancers. Individuals diagnosed with AIDS are susceptible to life-threatening diseases, called opportunistic infections, which are caused by microbes that usually do not cause illness in healthy people.”

According to WNCAP prevention educator, Michael Harney, while not as many people are currently dying of AIDS due to “HIV cocktails,” or new drug advancements, there continue to be 40,000 new infections each year in the US. Fifty percent of new AIDS/HIV infections affect people in the age group of 15 – 25 years old; ten percent of all new infections affect those age 50 and older.

WNCAP is also concerned with preventing the spread of other diseases. North Carolina is currently second in the nation in numbers of syphilis cases, fourth in gonorrhea, and 14th in chlamydia. Hepatitis C, a liver disease spread through contact with infected blood, is also a major concern.

“It’s a problem because we can’t talk about it,” said Harney, “you can’t say HIV, can’t say what puts us at risk.” He believes that in order to reduce the spread of HIV and STDs people must talk about them. Many people don’t realize what is and isn’t a risk for spreading STDs. Unprotected sex, unprotected oral sex, sharing needles for injecting drugs, and receiving unhygenic piercings and tattoos are all risks for spreading HIV and other diseases.

The prevention education arm of WNCAP includes several approaches. Conducting HIV/ AIDS awareness talks and courses is one primary focus for WNCAP’s prevention educators. Tyran Strauss, WNCAP’s Women’s Educator Coordinator, who also concentrates on teenagers and minorities, explained, “We have ongoing programs at after school programs and recovery centers, but Michael and I will respond to anybody who wants education.” The offer includes business groups, religious groups, families or house parties. In October at the ACRC, Strauss will also be teaching a 6-7 session course on HIV/STD prevention and sexual empowerment.

Harney does street outreach and also runs Project Safe Guard, “To address men who have sex with men whether they identify as gay or not.” As part of the street outreach he goes to bars to talk to people about disease prevention and distributes condoms. Harney also distributes free to the public condoms in 26 different locations throughout the Asheville area. Last year he distributed 85,000 condoms.

“We need to have a healthier environment, a healthier community,” said Harney, “I wish that the schools would take HIV and STDs more seriously, have a more focused sex ed. curriculum.” He thinks the push in education, as required by law, for abstinence, is problematic because, “The fact is people do begin early in their lives without knowledge about disease, about sexual development. The truth is that we’re not abstinent; from sex, from drugs, from alcohol.” His job is to help people make more informed, conscious decisions.

Another key factor is preventing the spread of HIV/AIDS and other STDs is getting tested for infection. Free HIV screening is offered at the Buncombe County Health Center, located in downtown Asheville and Western North Carolina Community Health Services, located in West Asheville. WNC Community Health Services also provides most of the medical attention for WNCAP’s clients. Twenty-four hours a day, seven-days a week information and consultation is available at 1-800-342-AIDS or at 1-800-344-CIDA for Spanish speakers.

World AIDS Day is Dec. 1, and WNCAP will be working in conjunction Buncombe County Parks and Recreation Department, Buncombe County Health Center, and WNC Community Health Services to hold a high school battle of the bands at the Orange Peel to commemorate the date. National HIV Testing Day is June 27.

The program also produces a publication called WNC Positive News, which includes articles on topics such as medication and reports from WNCAP going-ons and a resource guide.

WNCAP is supported by the United Way and a variety of donations and government grants. The case managers receive funding from The Ryan White Care Act, national legislation passed in the early 1990’s. On the prevention side, federal money from the Center for Disease Control trickles down in the form of a block grant to the state NC, which in turn gives money to the NC HIV/STD Prevention and care branch in Raleigh, which funds grants based on proposals submitted by organizations. However, the state only provides one fifth of the condoms to be distributed in a year. Also, the annual Raise Your Hand Auction is to be held this fall as a fundraiser. Andie McDowell has agreed to be an honorary chairperson for the auction this year.

Volunteers are needed to participate in buddy programs, food delivery with Loving Foods Resources, transportation, clerical/office work and special events. Both Strauss and Harney speak Spanish and the public is welcome to visit the office to use the education resource library, get condoms or literature. For more information contact WNCAP at (828) 252-7489.

A whistle-stop tour through the global justice movement

Review by Danny Fairfax

One No, Many Yeses: A Journey to the Heart of the Global Resistance Movement (Earthlight 2003)

By Paul Kingsnorth

Former deputy editor of the British Ecologist magazine Paul Kingsnorth set himself an ambitious task for his first book, One No, Many Yeses: to “journey to the heart of the global resistance movement” and ask “What exactly is it? Who is involved, what do they want, and how do they aim to get it?”

Kingsnorth admirably attempts to combine “a manifesto, an investigation [and] a travel book” in one book. However, it is by no means a Lonely Planet-style definitive guide to the worldwide social justice movement. Instead, he takes the reader on a dizzying whirlwind tour of the movements across the continents.

Kingsnorth begins his voyage, appropriately enough, where many pinpoint as the birthplace of the current wave of struggle: the remote Mexican province of Chiapas, where the Zapatistas launched an uprising in 1994, guided by the enigmatic Subcomandante Marcos.

Going on a package tour of the autonomous zones, where the Zapatistas’ ideals of self-determination, decentralization and sustainability are slowly, and despite great obstacles, being put into practice, Kingsnorth observes the phenomenon of Zapaturism (Zapatista tourism), and its mountain of merchandise. However, “despite all the nice posters and cute dolls ... this is still a revolution.”

From Mexico, he moves on to Italy, Bolivia, West Papua, Brazil, South Africa and the US. As he participates in protests against the G8 in Genoa in July 2001, which were marred by brutal police repression, marches against privatisation in Johannesburg, visits farms occupied by Brazilian peasants and accompanies New York’s actor/performance artist “Reverend Billy” from the “Church of Stop Shopping,” Kingsnorth gains a real appreciation of the multifaceted nature of the movement.

The weakest parts of the book are its lengthy sections on the US activists he chooses to feature. Indeed, it seems odd that so much space is devoted to them, as they are largely isolated individuals, doing work divorced from the mass movements.

To the reader in 2003, they seem like a throwback to five years ago or more, before the 1999 Seattle protests against the World Trade Organization and its successors turned individual crusades into a cohesive worldwide movement of millions. When millions of people came out on the streets against war and globalization in 2002-03, the strangely hermitic activity of the likes of the Reverend Billy seem far less relevant. Kingsnorth concedes there are huge flaws in their strategies.

One No, Many Yeses more than compensates for this with its powerful accounts of the successes of mass grassroots campaigns in South Africa and Latin America. To his great credit, Kingsnorth affirms that the movement goes far beyond the headline-grabbing actions of First World protesters.

Most striking are his accounts of the occupations of idle farmland in Brazil by farmers tied to the Movimiento sem Terra (MST, the Landless Workers’ Movement). Since 1984, the MST has resettled more than 300,000 families on land which, for the first time, they control. It is still a drop in the ocean, but it demonstrates on a micro-scale what can be achieved if the world’s oligarchs are confronted. And, perhaps most saliently, as one farmer tells Kingsnorth: “The most important thing the MST has given me is my dignity.”

While in Brazil, Kingsnorth also takes in the plethora of conferences, seminars and workshops which made up the second World Social Forum (WSF) in Porto Alegre in 2002. Attended by 60,000, Kingsnorth found it as “exciting as it is overwhelming.”

His account of Porto Alegre begins the second part of the book, “Many Yeses,” which examines what it is that the movement is for. As his subtitle suggests, there were many visions for the movement on display at the WSF — so many, indeed, that the author begins “to think, treasonably, that far from not having any alternatives, this movement has too many of them.”

However, Kingsnorth does not see the main point of the differences as that between reformists and revolutionaries — the old “fix it or nix it” dichotomy.

“This debate — rarely useful, usually frustrating, often artificial, always systemic and never likely to be resolved — will run and run,” he states.

Instead, Kingsnorth sees the fundamental differences as those between the “new politics of resistance and the old revolutionary left.” He asserts that this “new” movement, which is “inspired by Zapatismo and radical democracy, that speaks a new language, promotes new ideas and wants no party or vanguard to lead it, can never make its peace with dogmatic statists from the Utopian left”.

To support this contention, Kingsnorth produces a litany of charges against the British Socialist Workers Party in relation to its activities within the movement. Some of the criticisms may be valid, but they are used to unfairly smear the entire revolutionary left. But Kingsnorth ignores the constructive and often crucial role of Marxist organizations such as France’s Revolutionary Communist League (LCR) and Italy’s Party of Communist Refoundation (PRC).

Kingsnorth ends the book with an attempt to synthesise the goals of the movement into a coherent political program. Maintaining that his biggest revelation is “that this is really all about one thing: Power”, he presents a minimum and a maximum program, which he calls “Clearing the ground” and “Sowing the seeds.”

The former involves measures such as the abolition of the global financial institutions, a reigning in of corporate power in favor of “the commons” and a democratization of global decision-making. These would be a “minimum requirements for the kind of world this movement wants to see.”

Kingsnorth eschews the term “socialism,” or indeed any concept of “isms” or “big ideas.” But the world he maps out — one of democracy not dictatorship, diversity not monoculturism, decentralization not concentration, sovereignty not dependence and access not enclosure — is socialism in the truest sense of the word.

Source: Green Left Weekly