END:CIV examines our culture’s addiction to systematic violence and environmental exploitation, and probes the resulting epidemic of poisoned landscapes and shell-shocked nations.

Based in part on Endgame, the best-selling book by Derrick Jensen, END:CIV asks: “If your homeland was invaded by aliens who cut down the forests, poisoned the water and air, and contaminated the food supply, would you resist?”

Directors: Franklin Lopez
Language English
Studio: Mvd Visual
Release Date: 25 Jan 2011
Run Time: 75 minutes

More info here

EMERGENCY CALL FROM IBIZA

The deep blue waters around Ibiza and its neighbouring islands can truly be called a natural paradise. They are home to whales, dolphins and thousands of species of fish. But this unique oasis could vanish forever – if we don’t offer resistance together.

Right in the waters of the Spanish archipelago the oil industry wants to search for oil, using unimaginably loud air guns. This extreme noise can cause marine animals to panic, to beach or to die on open sea. Even marine protected areas would be affected!

Protest now

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We have to stop the ruthless oil companies immediately. We have only 3 weeks left. But we’ve got a plan how to avert catastrophe. To do so, we now need your support.

On August 4^th an OceanCare expert delegation will be going to Spain to directly negotiate with the government. We will struggle as hard as we can to stop the projected oil exploration. But we need additional pressure by the public – by people like you. Only then our call will gain the necessary weight to be successful.

Please help by sending a letter of protest against the planned oil exploration to the Spanish government. Protest now: http://www.silentoceans.com

Together we can protect marine animals from deadly noise.

PS: Please share our protest on facebook or via e-mail. The more people are joining, the more powerful our voice for marine animal protection will be. Thank you!

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One hundred years ago women couldn’t vote in England. Two hundred years ago you could keep a slave. It is clear that society evolves as attitudes change, but until this is recognised in law it is just opinion.

It may well be that one hundred years from now our great grandchildren will look back at our time – when drug addicts are punished, not treated – with a similar shudder. “How cruel” they might say, but also how disingenuous. The War on Drugs has failed and our society reels from drug-induced self-harm.

Frederick Douglas – a former slave, abolitionist leader said: “No man can put a chain about the ankle of his fellow man without at last finding the other end fastened about his own neck.”  When we consider the devastation reeked by the black market drug trade, the suffering of swelling prison populations and the price paid by tax payers we see that the costs of prohibition and punishment are great indeed.

Prohibition has always been divisive but currently it is under intense international scrutiny and change is in the air. The United States has led the global War on Drugs and now has more prisoners then any other country. Approximately 1% of its population is behind bars, almost 2.5 million people. Of these, approximately two thirds are non-white and the most serious charge against 51 percent of these inmates is a drug offence. Only four percent are in for robbery and only one percent for homicide. 

For an increasing number of Americans this is no longer acceptable.  At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Texas Governor Rick Perry said: “After 40 years of the war on drugs, I can’t change what happened in the past. What I can do as the governor of the second largest state in the nation is to implement policies that start us toward a decriminalisation and keep people from going to prison and destroying their lives, and that’s what we’ve done over the last decade.”

President Obama said “I don’t think [marijuana] is more dangerous than alcohol.”  These previously heretical opinions are now being reflected in changing laws. Colorado and Washington have led the charge and now the people of Alaska and Oregon may approve a tax-and-regulate system later this year.

In the UK an e-petition led by Green MP Caroline Lucas urging the Government to review the Misuse of Drugs Act collected more than 100,000 signatures.  Backed by Sir Richard Branson, Sting, Dame Joan Bakewell and Sir Ian Gilmore, former president of the Royal College of Physicians, its most visible supporter, Russell Brand, pointed out that “almost 2,000 young people die in the UK each year from taking illegal drugs of uncertain potency, that they can only get hold of on the illegal market.”

Russell Brand at Select Committee

As Brand has pointed out repeatedly in his unique and compelling way, updating drug laws is, in large part, about extending compassion to addicts. Many drug dependants were abused as children or have suffered horribly and, as Brand puts it, use drugs “to anaesthetise the pain of living.’’  Can any of us say we wouldn’t have acted similarly in their situation?  In offering compassion and understanding we can help addicts heal and bypass the vast amount of criminal activity based on them either trying to get their hit or gangs striving to deliver it.

Is the urge to punish addicts as much a driver and perpetuator of addiction as the pain that caused it in the first place? Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that “The love that you withhold is the pain that you carry.”  This has a social analogue in addiction.  A more compassionate approach, treating addiction as a health issue not a legal one, would enable us to help those suffering – improving our chances of freeing them from their hell and reducing the crime and misery that goes along with it under the current legal framework.

As the great wheel of progress rolls on we might wonder what is next?

We withhold love from nature and carrying the pain of a dying biosphere.  The challenges of drug addiction and ecological collapse may seem to be of different realms but we may actually find that progress towards one supports the other and that an extension of our compassion brings the change. Charles Eisenstein recently suggested that decriminalising drugs “may offer us a gateway away from machine values” of domination and control towards the organic values of symbiosis which may be the hallmark of an ecological world.

Compassion is the emotion that we feel in response to the suffering of others that motivates a desire to help. It requires us to identify with people beyond ourselves be they slaves, women or drug addicts. But what about forests, rivers and even Gaia herself?

The pioneer of Deep Ecology Arne Næss wrote that “care flows naturally if the “self” is widened and deepened so that the protection of free nature is felt as the protection of ourselves”. Can compassion for nature bust us out of the prison of ecological collapse?

The ethical leaps forward society has historically made have been based upon extending our compassion. If creating an ecological society is actually about us now extending our compassion to other beings then addressing the collapsing biosphere is not something that happens “out there” in a distant and abstracted “environment” but is an internal process of personal development – an opportunity available to all of us based on expanding our sense of self.

Compassion emerges not as an indulgence for the charitable but as a courageous path to solving intractable social problems. Either way, according  to Dalai Lama it is worth doing: “If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.”

As opinions change so laws follow. Today, new laws are being drafted around the world. Polly Higgins leads a campaign for the United Nations to recognise “Ecocide” as a crime. Ecuador and Bolivia have laws recognising the rights of nature and in Europe a network of lawyers and campaigners are launching a European Citizen’s Initiative to include the rights of nature in the European Constitution. Many people already feel like nature is a part of themselves and, identifying with her, feel compassion. Now they are demanding that the legal systems catches up.

Eisenstein asks us to consider the “more beautiful world that our heart’s know is possible.” In this world we might not systematically punish people who have slipped into addiction nor wipe out species and ecosystems just to keep digits spinning in a catastrophically floored global economy. To get there we need to shorten the distance between our hearts and the long arm of the law.

Fractured Country: an Unconventional Invasion’ is a new film from Lock the Gate Alliance (Australia) about the risks to communities from invasive gasfields. This is the full version of the documentary.

Lock The Gate Alliance

Australians are uniting to protect their land and water.

1. Natural gas from fracking is not clean. The gas burns more cleanly than other fossil fuels, but in the course of its entire life cycle, it’s actually worse than coal, long touted as the dirtiest of our fossil fuels. Because fracking involves mixing millions of gallons of water laced with chemicals into the ground at high pressure, it creates fissures in the shale that release the natural gas. Life cycle analysis expert Robert Howarth, PhD, professor of ecology and environmental biology at Cornell University, discovered that anywhere from 3.6 to nearly 8 percent of the methane from shale gas drilling escapes through venting and leaks. Methane is a greenhouse gas about 23 times more potent than carbon dioxide.

Howarth’s latest life cycle calculations updated in January 2011 find that when considering the burning of natural gas, and the methane leaks that fracking creates, shale gas produces 1.20- to 2.1-fold more greenhouse gas emissions when compared to coal during a 20-year time period. Methane leaks are worse during the actual fracking process, but they continue to slowly seep over long periods of time. When considering this, natural gas is on par with coal when looking at greenhouse gas production over a 100-year period, the Cornell research shows.

2. Fracking chemicals are extremely dangerous. Since most natural gas drilling companies will not disclose all of the products they use in the drilling process, Theo Colborn, PhD, founder and president of The Endocrine Disruption Exchange, set out to figure out what’s in the chemical cocktails used to drill wells and frack. She and her team found 649 different chemicals, more than half of which are known to disrupt the endocrine system. Exposure to these types of chemicals has been linked to certain cancers, diabetes, obesity, and metabolic syndrome (the name for a group of risk factors that occur together and increase the risk for heart disease, stroke, and type 2 diabetes). Fifty-five percent of the chemicals cause brain and nervous system damage, and many are linked to cancer and organ damage. The threat of exposure to these chemicals occurs via contaminated air, water, and soil. “They’re getting away with absolute murder; it’s criminal, the things they’re doing,” says award-winning scientist Colborn. “If you destroy an aquifer, you’ve lost it. You’ve destroyed your drinking water supply.”

3. Natural gas drilling turns clean country air to smog. Even if drilling and the fracking process run completely according to plan with no leaks, no methane migration into drinking water wells, no explosions, and no issues dealing with wastewater, air pollution from fracking is inevitable. It’s part of the process, as huge condensate tanks and compressor stations release toxic hydrocarbons like benzene, toluene, xylenes, and ethylbenzene (BTEX) into surrounding communities. At high levels, exposure to BTEX vapors may cause irreversible damage. That, paired with chemicals used in the initial drilling process, make it very harmful to live in the vicinity of a drilling operation, Colborn says. Her study in the International Journal of Human and Ecological Risk Assessment found that 36 percent of the identifiable chemicals used are volatile, meaning they become airborne. Among those, 93 percent have been shown to harm the eyes, skin, sensory organs, respiratory tract, gastrointestinal tract, or liver.

4. Fracking releases uranium. That’s right, the radioactive stuff. The 2005 Energy Act included what is known as the Halliburton Loophole, which exempts the natural gas drilling industry from many safeguards, such as the Clean Water Act, intended to protect citizens from industrial corporate activities that pollute. While the chemical cocktail used in fracking has been of much concern, new research is pointing to another fact: Contaminants and dangerous substances trapped deep underground become mobilized when fracking creates mini-earthquake-like explosions underground. A 2010 study out of the University of Buffalo found that natural gas drilling using the fracking method could potentially contaminate water supplies with uranium.

5. Fracking affects everyone. A natural gas survey released in December 2010 found that regardless of political leanings, most people are concerned about fracking. Even if you don’t live atop a major shale deposit, the pollution generated in fracking could affect you. Conrad Dan Volz, DrPH, MPH, director of the Center for Healthy Environments and Communities and the GSPH Environmental Health Risk Assessment Certificate Program at the University of Pittsburgh, notes that as more wells are installed in various states, there’s more toxic wastewater to deal with. Wastewater from fracking operations is often sent to municipal treatment plants that are not properly equipped to handle contamination by more than 600 chemicals, and possibly radioactive material. This wastewater is often shipped to locations where fracking isn’t even taking place, threatening rivers and drinking water supplies in those towns.

Fracking: The Dangers

(from: Clean Water Action)

Fracking uses a toxic chemical cocktail known as fracking fluid.

• Companies using fracking fluid have resisted disclosing the contents of fracking fluid, claiming the information is proprietary. However, samples from well sites indicate that the fluid contains: formaldehyde, acetic acids, citric acids, and boric acids, among hundreds of other contaminants.
• It has recently come to light that, despite the illegality of the action, companies have been caught using diesel fuel in the fracking fluid.

Fracking removes millions of gallons of precious freshwater from the water cycle.

• Each well uses between two and five million gallons of locally-sourced freshwater which will be permanently contaminated by ground contaminants and toxic chemicals contained in the fracking fluid.
• About half of this water returns to the surface, where it is stored in steel containers until it can be injected deep underground in oil and gas waste wells.
• No one is entirely sure what happens to the other half of the water used in the process. Our best guess is that the water remains underground, though there are indications that at least some of this toxic cocktail makes its way back into the water supply.

Fracking causes a range of environmental problems.

• At least eight other states have reported surface, ground, and drinking water contamination due to fracking.
• In Pennsylvania, over 1,400 environmental violations have been attributed to deep gas wells utilizing fracking practices.
• Pollution from truck traffic, chemical contamination around storage tanks, and habitat fragmentation and damage from drilling to environmentally sensitive areas have are all related to fracking.

 National Updates

In Germany, opposition has become fierce enough to disrupt gas development, though there has been known contamination from faulty, leaking pipelines in the Saxony region. Yet, it was the tiny breadbasket nation of Bulgaria, ripe for gas exploration, who took to the streets and squares brandishing loaves of bread, and succeeding in winning the next national ban.

England reportedly has more than 200 trillion cubit feet of gas under Lancashire, which Cuadrilla Resources estimates could create up to 5,600 jobs, with as many as 1,700 in that shire alone. Two earthquakes near Blackpool in May, 2011, however, where no seismic activity has ever been recorded, put the kibosh on Cuadrilla’s plans. After the second quake, which measured 1.5 in magnitude, occurred off the Fylde coast, the British government compelled the company to cease fracking operations until more about this drilling method is known. Wales, meanwhile, unanimously voted to deny permits for exploratory wells. In Ireland, as you might imagine, the fractivist cause is alive and well though tight gas reserves are relatively small. Fancy that.

IS FRACKING Somerset’s best kept secret? Do we realise that the village of Ston Easton, only a few miles away from Wells, is already under threat from the frackers with licences already applied for?

Some may say, do we care? After all we may get cheaper fuel and if each village is paid the sum of £100,000 as a sweetener by the Government for each well fracked, what could be bad? What’s not to like? What is not to like is the possibility of poisoned water created by the fracking process leaking into our water supplies, our streams, rivers, fields and gardens.

Each well requires millions of gallons of water (five million gallons is the figure quoted) to drive the shale gas to the surface.

This water is not clean – it has been mixed for maximum effectiveness with a toxic cocktail of chemicals, benzene, formaldehyde, uranium, mercury and lead among others. Some 20 to 40 per cent of this water will flow back to the surface and when it does it will be even more toxic as it will have picked up from deep underground naturally occurring radioactive material which it has disturbed.

This murky mix now has to be disposed of somehow and who can guarantee this will be done without spillage? The Department of Energy and Climate Chang tells me that all possible safety regulations will be put in place to minimise any dangers – how reassuring.

More information and useful links

https://www.lush.co.uk/article/ground-frack-free-somerset
http://www.britainirelandfrackfree.co.uk/