Connecting the Dots: OWS and the Environment

The connections may not seem obvious at first. Occupy Wall Street is about financial inequity, bailouts and political corruption, right? What does illegally camping in a city park have to do with saving the planet? Quite a lot, actually.

Occupy Wall Street has always been about more than just Wall Street; it is something much bigger than a movement against big banks and modern finance.

Glenn Hurowitz, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy, says the protests and environmental issues naturally overlap. “Nobody is a better symbol of...corporate greed and corruption than the oil and coal industries,” he says. “For a lot of people in the Occupy movement, part of creating a better world is making sure we have a living planet.”

“I am not an environmentalist, but I can understand that we need to discover a better way to live,” said Humboldt Occupier and Anthropology major at Humboldt State University, Carolynn Williams. “My greatest fear is that the wonderful life that I live today is what will make it impossible for the human race to continue later.”

Since its the movement was born on September 17 in New York City, Occupy Wall Street (OWS) has grown and sprouted solidarity Occupy groups across the country, and around the globe.

Perhaps due to our deep activist roots here in Humboldt, not one, but three individual Occupy encampents sprung up in the early weeks of the movement: Arcata, Eureka, and Humboldt (HSU campus). Much larger cities, in comparison, only have one! Recently, a county-wide group was formed to facilitate cooperation, support, participation and consensus building between the three satellite groups.

Desiree Perez, Humboldt Occupier and Arcata resident, said she joined Occupy Humboldt because of her frustrations over false government claims. “Of, for and by the people had become too bald a lie,” she said. “I couldn’t remain quiet anymore. I wanted to be active in challenging and changing that hypocrisy.”

Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone describes it this way, “This is a visceral, impassioned, deep seated rejection of the entire direction of our society, a refusal to take even one more step forward into the shallow commercial abyss of phoniness, short-term calculation, withered idealism and intellectual bankruptcy that American mass society has become”.

Jerry Dinzes, Humboldt Occupier, suggests taxpayer’s dollars would be better used to restore the environment, instead of bailing out Wall Street and banks. “California state park systems are going down, but Wall Street is given trillions of dollars,” Dinzes said.

Williams, Perez and Dinzes have been involved with Occupy Humboldt since it began October 1, helping with the media and outreach committee,  among other things. At many encampments, sustainabililty working groups, such as permaculture, greywater, seed bombs, peddle power, composting, and solar energy might also be found, as they  were in New York. 

Occupy Humboldt’s camp uses a solar panel to help charge media devices like laptops and cell phones. In Washington, D.C., Kelly Mears, who “handles all the tech stuff” for the Occupy camp, stated that “the true Occupiers are very, very excited” about the acquisition of solar panels.

Sustainable food production is another concern among Occupiers. Williams  is an advocate for reduced meat consumption. “As a planet we don’t have water to spare,” she said. “We don’t have the energy to spare; we don’t have the food to spare to support [it].”

Elizabeth Clark shares Williams’ concerns about our food production system. “I want to see more local sustainability as far as the food industry goes,” Clark said. “So that we are not producing and wasting so much dirty energy on mass production.”

 Climate change is another major issue of concern. “The reason that it’s so great that we’re occupying Wall Street is because Wall Street has been occupying the atmosphere,” stated Bill McKibben, author and co-founder of 350.org and Tar Sands Action. By combing energies, Occupy and tar sands activists were able to organize major protests against the Keystone XL pipeline, which would have pumped toxic tar sands oil from Canada to the Gulf Coast. NASA Climate expert  James Hansen famously described tar sands oil extraction as “game over” for our climate.

“There is easy oil to get, there is hard oil to get,” Williams said. “We don’t have the easy oil anymore; we burned all of the easy oil. And it’s hard to get at the hard oil.”

The ongoing Gulf oil catastrophe is another prime example of how putting profits and industry interests above the well being of the environment often results in disaster. “BP wasn’t just risking its oil well, it was risking the entire Gulf of Mexico ecosystem, which is something that wasn’t theirs,” she said. Ruined, for the profits and interests of the oil industry.

By identifying the movement as the 99% vs the 1%, the inequity between  those responsible for environmental and economic catastrophese and those who bear the brunt of the consequences is made clear. The one percent is a representation of the political and corporate personhood that generates a majority of decisions the 99% are forced live with.

Perez feels strongly about the inequality represented through the divide. “As long as we continue to have a revolving door between regulatory bodies and the industries they regulate; as long as profit and cost are recognized only in terms of money,” Perez said.

“As long as growth is more important than sustainability, then it will always be in the interest of the one percent to overlook, ignore and even stand in the way of efforts to live in harmony with the natural world.”

The voices of the 99% are making it difficult for the one percent to ignore their grievances. Occupations worldwide are staying connected and working together via conference calls, online social media, and email exchanges.

Zachary Shahan  of Planet Save wrote, “I don’t think Occupy Wall Street is going away. And those concerned about the environment, global warming, and climate change have every reason to join in the movement and push for real change. We all should.”

“By the people, for the people,” Clark said. “Together, we make the change.”

Ashley Ward is a journalism student at HSU and a Humboldt Occupier.
Morgan Corviday is the editor of EcoNews.