WCRS Podcast - What You Care About

Kimberly Jackson Morris & Jamira Jamison

tomover@thecolumbusactivist.org

Morris and I spoke during President Obama's visit to Columbus on Sept 13. Most of the protestors who had been there to tell Obama to not approve the Keystone XL Pipeline project had left. Keystone XL would carry tar sands oil from Canada to Texas where it would be refined and shipped to other countries.

There were no people of color in the protest, though a Black elder sat nearby on a lawn chair so as to stay in the shade during the hot September day.

Morris said the under-representation of people of color in the environmental movement is a case in point on the importance of education.

"We're not educated on those facts...When you go into lower economic areas, there's no one standing there giving us information about a pipeline."

Morris said white middle class, environmental activists should spend time in Black and low-income parts of town.

"Go into those communities and talk to people. There are people who aren't too busy to listen. But the information isn't there. Do you go into these communities and speak w/ people about these things that you're protesting ? I'm talking about urban communities."

Morris said standing in the streets holding signs won't necessarily engage people who aren't currently involved with environmental and other causes.

Andrew Sidesinger and about two dozen other activists were on Cleveland Avenue chanting and holding signs to remind President Obama he has the authority to reject the Keystone XL Pipeline plan.

Sidesinger said tar sands oil extraction violates the rights of indigenous people in Canada, and that it has an enormous amount of green house gas emissions.

"The tar sands is an incredibly dirty project. It destroys a beautiful pristine forest in Canada. It destroys, for every one gallon of gasoline made, 20 gallons of water."

As for why such an environmentally destructive plan is even being considered in the first place, Sidesinger said, "There are a lot of heavily invested oil companies and pipeline companies and people who want to make more money...Everybody drives cars and everybody wants more oil. They want cheap oil."

But this project won't lower oil or gas prices, Sidesinger said.

"Demand is skyrocketing. We need to find ways to reduce our usage, not continue these insane projects. There has to be a limit to what we as a society thinks is reasonable for ways to get our energy. We're scraping the bottom of the barrel, which you saw with BP and the Gulf of Mexico disaster. We're now in the Arctic drilling, where there are no resources to clean up a spill, and we're destroying a beautiful forest and turning it into a moonscape."

Sidesinger said there are better options for getting our energy.

Fallah said though this demonstration is in Columbus Ohio, it is part of a movement to improve the lives of workers all over the world.

“In my opinion, all these issues are interconnected…although we’re standing here today to support the rights of farm workers which happen to be mostly immigrants, the rights of American farmers are also being violated.”

He said the corporatist attack on workers is systematic and has been going on for a long time.

Fallah is from Iran.

“ I come from a land of oppression. It used to be oppressive before the Islamic Revolution and more oppressive even after the revolution. Ever since I can remember, I have been sensitive to the issues of poverty, injustice, human rights violations, and civil rights.”

Fallah agreed activists in the US have options that our counterparts in many other countries don’t.

“I think it’s the responsibility of everybody to stand up for the rights of others…If there are people who are not in a position to stand up for their rights (such as immigrant farm laborers who don’t speak English), then we’re responsible to stand up for their rights.”

“The fact that we can be here (in the shopping center where a Kroger store is located) is a good right, although it gets ignored because, unfortunately, a lot of people here are very disconnected.

“ I don’t mean to say they’re insensitive, but their lack of reaction (to the demonstration) may indicate there’s some degree of insensitivity. Also there’s a degree of comfort here which you may not find in other countries.

“Because ‘as long as I get my tomatoes for the lowest price and I get my clothing, I don’t care whether the sweatshop workers in Syria are getting raped, or if in Indonesia and other countries there’s abuse and slavery going on.’ Whether it’s in this country, which is happening, or in other countries there’s that attitude which is like ‘hey, as long as I’m ok and getting my stuff, then let it be.’”

Wendy Ake (left) and Deb Steele outside the Kroger near the corner of Olentangy River and Ackerman Roads

Ake works with the recently formed Central Ohio Immigrant Justice (COIJ)

She expects more groups will get involved in the demos in front of various Kroger stores in Columbus.

"The Kroger headquarters is located in Westerville. So Columbus is probably going to be more and more of an active hub for this movement."

Ake said demos are planned for Kroger stores in urban areas as well as suburbs.

Increasingly, people in wealthy nations such as the US are interested in local and organic food. But she said labor and human rights issues often are not prominent in those movements.

"People are mainly engaged with health issues and maybe chemical inputs into their food but not so much with the labor and human rights issues involved with their food."

"Early on when the food movement started contemporaneous w/ the environmental movement back in the 70s, all of these issues were looked at. But when the FDA began to articulate its standards for the organic movement, it looked specifically at the chemical inputs ...and so the human rights issues and standards began to be marginalized."

She and other activists are working on changing that. She agreed people's hearts and minds can be engaged by way of their palates and stomachs, connecting a wide variety of social justice and environmental causes for a mass movement to defeat corporatism. She said human rights and environmentalism are inseparable.

"When we have global warming, for instance, the people most impacted are the most marginalized populations, globally and in our own backyards."