Clean Coal is a Dirty Lie. Sign held by a Hopi youth at a protest against Peabody in Denver, Colorado.

The indigenous environmental justice movement celebrated a victory, early January 2010, when a judge ruled that Peabody Energy cannot expand its coal mining operations on the Black Mesa in northern Arizona.  Former president Bush Jr. approved a permit for Peabody in the twilight of his outgoing administration—not surprising, when you consider that Peabody’s parent holding company was Bechtel, a defense contractor with strong political ties—a permit that failed to fulfill all administrative requirements.  Groups including the Black Mesa Water Coalition filed a petition in early 2009, charging that prerequisites, such as filing an Environmental Impact Statement, were ignored, thereby making the approved permit invalid.

For many Navajo, life in the past thirty years has been inextricably linked to coal mining.  As a small girl, Enei Begaye, knew to be quiet when visiting her friends’ houses.  Everyone in the small town of Kayenta, Arizona worked in the coal mines, which operated twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.  Some worked night shifts, so Begaye and her friends would play quietly to not disturb the sleeping elders.  Most of the population of over 4,900 residents in Kayenta were employed by Peabody Energy and lived in the trailers the company setup for its workers.

As an adult, Begaye, now co-director of the Black Mesa Water Coalition, questioned the coal mining that sustained her family and hometown, and devastated and torn apart Navajo and Hopi communities.  Energy demands increased in the late 1970s during the oil crisis and large corporations such as Southern California Edison casted about for other sources of fuel.  When the corporations spied the black gold underfoot the Navajo lands, the energy companies colluded with the U.S. federal government to raise questions about Navajo claim over the lands.  The land was transferred to the Hopis and 12,000 Navajo families were displaced from their ancestral homes.  Uprooted from their homes and traditional ways of subsistence, many Navajo fell into poverty and despair, forced to accept any jobs that came their way, including coal mining.

The Black Mesa Water Coalition and partners in the indigenous environmental justice movement organized to shut down Kayenta’s Black Mesa Coal Mine in 2005.  Apart from the low wages and hazardous working conditions of the mines, the operations polluted the township and surrounding environment.  Judith Nies described the disastrous environmental consequences of the technique, strip mining, of removing coal where “the land has turned gray, all vegetation has disappeared, the air is filled with coal dust, the groundwater is contaminated with toxic runoff, and electric green ponds dot the landscape.”  Sheep that drink from these ponds by noon, she added, die by suppertime.

The coal from Kayenta fed two power plants, the Mojave Generating Station and Navajo Generating Station.  The former, the Mojave Generating Station, provided electricity to Southern California and Las Vegas.  The latter helped to power the irrigation of the urban sprawl extending outwards from Phoenix and Tucson, Arizona.  Neither provided electricity for the surrounding communities.  In fact, less than half of Navajo families have electricity or running water on the reservation.

The latest curb on coal mining on Navajo lands is a bittersweet victory for many on the reservation who are still dependent on the low wage jobs the mines provide.  Begaye found it hard for many years to return home to Kayenta to face her friends’ parents, who lost their mining jobs.  Now, organizers with the Black Mesa Water Coalition see their strategy for indigenous justice as two-pronged: rid the land of dirty coal mining and advocate for the just transition for Navajo and Hopi peoples to a sustainable and locally-owned economy that provides high quality green jobs and career pathways for indigenous youth and adults.  The Black Mesa Water Coalition and the Navajo Green Jobs campaign won another victory this summer when they successfully lobbied the Navajo Tribal Council to enact green jobs legislation.

The recent judge ruling supports Navajo leadership, not only among tribal nations but also for all of us, in defining the new green way of living.  “We don’t want to create a capitalist system within our tribal society,” explained Begaye.  “We’re in a special position, we’ve got a system that needs to be trashed, an economic system that needs to be gotten rid of.  We need to create a new economy that doesn’t devastate but create and empower our communities to function in a healthy way.”

Photo by the Black Mesa Water Coalition.

The concept of community is an ever-shifting one.

It first becomes applied to movements for social change after World War II, when a dissatisfied social worker Saul Alinksy shifted his efforts into organizing urban communities, based on geographic proximity. He was the first recognizable community organizer that developed a model beyond just delivering goods or providing services, like the settlement houses that serviced the poor in the late 19th century. Community to Alinsky was based on physical proximity to your neighbors and the goal of community organizing was to build neighborhood, place-based, mega-organization that united various service providers, such as labor unions and churches.

But, the focus was short-sighted, trained on winning a metaphorical stop sign on your block, with campaigns guided by non-ideological and pragmatic goals, divorced of any critique of racism or sexism. This shaped the role of the organizer as an apolitical technocrat, an outside specialist, distinct from the community. Often, the leadership and staff of these bureaucratic organizations were white men, who were capable of working endless hours to get that stop sign installed.

Enter the 1960s and the global struggles of the Third World to shrug off its colonial masters. Radical movements within the U.S., who sought to eradicate poverty and institutional racism domestically, identified common interests with liberation movements abroad. This was the third world within. The same axes of oppression—racism, sexism, and capitalism—operated within communities of color at home. This new sense of community, what the Applied Research Center’s founder Gary Delgado terms as “communities of interest”, led to multiracial formations that tackled a wide variety of issues, beyond a single campaign, and prioritized indigenous leadership by community members so there isn’t a bureaucratic apparatus that mediates political activity between decision-makers and the community. Community leaders are not just members, but also teachers, analysts, as well as actors.

Most importantly, multiracial formations placed race as primary in their political framework for identifying their vision and strategy. Race is historically and socially constructed, but with ongoing material ramifications for people of color. Structural racism is the primary form of oppression in this country that intersects with sexism and capitalist exploitation. The history of racism is embedded in the racist institutions that create conditions of poverty, lack of opportunity, and labor exploitation for communities of color.

Now, post-Obama, a new generation is defining community and its relation to social change. Organizing Upgrade, a collaboration by young organizers involved in multiracial formations, launched today. They define communities of interest based not just on shared oppression, but also on a shared, liberatory vision of what could be. This seems apt, given that we have a Black president in the White House, a former community organizer himself, and for the first time, our desires for our communities are possible.

Join the community of possibilities at OrganizingUpgrade.com

via RaceWire

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair…we had everything before us, we had nothing before us.*

The Obama administration enacted the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) back in February, the largest boon to public spending and the safety net since the New Deal, and yet economic conditions are the worst it’s ever been for people of color and single moms. Unemployment is skyrocketing close to double digits, at 9.7% for August 2009. New Census data released recently showed an increase in poverty from 12.5% to 13.2% this past year, meaning an additional 2.6 million persons now live in poverty. Certain groups experience deepened poverty rates more than others, according to the Economic Policy Institute:
• Latinos and Asians had marked increases in their poverty rates, by 1.6 and 1.4 points, respectively.
• Over one third of all Black children and almost one third of all Latino children lived in poverty in 2008.
• Nearly a quarter of all families headed by single moms lived in poverty, or 3.6 million families, in 2008.

Tracking funds from the Recovery Act has proven to be difficult because there is no centralized, authoritative source of where the money is going to and what it’s being used for. Currently, information about ARRA funds are dispersed across the federal recovery.gov website, state stimulus czars, and watchdog groups. Recipients of monies are required to report on their activities and how many jobs they’ve created because of it by October 10. But, information will only slowly trickle out to the public. Even then, there is no requirement for recipients to race or gender their data, so we have no way of knowing how much of the recovery benefits those most impacted: people of color and single moms.

We have been following the recovery and its promise to stimulate the economy while protecting the planet and its peoples through the creation of green jobs. Watch this page on October 13 for the release of our Green Equity Toolkit, ideas and resources for community and labor advocates on how to create equity in the emerging green economy. If we are to follow the directive of ARRA and the subsequent Office of Management and Budget (OMB) guidance to help those most impacted by the recession, then we must make race and gender equity key in our planning and practices around green job creation. The toolkit will help us do that.

Our initial research into recovery allocations in Los Angeles County brings to light some concerns. Los Angeles County, like many in this country, is cleft by a racial wealth divide into two types of cities: poor and rich. Poor cities of the county–half of the residents of the City of Los Angeles are people of color and one in five live in poverty–are receiving a quarter of the recovery dollars per poor person, as compared to rich cities. We designate cities such as Santa Monica and Beverly Hills as rich cities in the county, where more than 70% of the population are white and the poverty rate is well below the national average.

This is the worst economic downturn our country has experienced since the recession of the early 1980s and flirting dangerously to parallel the Great Depression of the 1930s. What will our generation remember when we look back at this time? Did we seize the opportunity of the Great Recession to bring about a green transformation to sustain all peoples, especially those most distressed? ARC provides the tools. We must act together to demand equity in the recovery, green or otherwise.

Photo taken by Jacob Ruff at the Mobilization for Climate Justice protest against Chevron in Richmond, California.

* A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens.

Join us in a May Day march to unite ALL workers!

2:00pm
RALLY at ROOSEVELT PARK in CHINATOWN
(Grand St. between Forsyth and Chrystie St.)
(B/D Train to Grand St. Station)

3:00pm
MARCH to UNION SQUARE

JOIN US TO DEMAND:
Repeal of the Employer Sanctions Provision
Legislate Equal Rights for All Workers
Establish a genuine path to citizenship for the undocumented

EQUAL RIGHTS FOR ALL WORKERS!
DON’T CRIMINALIZE IMMIGRANTS!

May Day originated in the United States when native and immigrant workers united to fight for the 8 hour day. Today we are calling all workers to come together – not just to fight for survival, but to fight for better lives, and control over our time and our lives.

Corporations reap billions off the backs of working people by pitting immigrant against citizen. At the same time, the government and elite call for strengthening of the Employer Sanctions Provision – a modern-day slave law – to create and expand the underclass of labor this law created. They are also pushing guestworker and legalization programs that will legalize a few, while criminalizing many more.

We march to forge unity among immigrant and native born workers, and build a movement to make equal rights for all workers a national priority this year. For more information, contact: Break the Chains Alliance, c/o NMASS 212-358-0295 | info@breakthechainsnow.org | www.breakthechainsnow.org