Waiting for the Revolution

You have to live here, beside what must be one of the most beautiful bays in the world, spend early evenings watching the sun go down behind the Golden Gate, climb the Berkeley Hills to view the whole Bay Area from San Jose to Vallejo, in order to realise why the ecology movement here is so spirited. The Bay is a shining blue mirror then you think about the raw sewage and industrial waste it contains. The hills are shaded sanctuaries until you come across a clearance for a new subdivision. On crossing the bay, high above the water on the top deck of the Bay Bridge, you can see the yellow haze of smog at each end of the Bay. Ecology groups thrive and multiply rapidly as the seriousness of the crisis that threatens the natural balance of the Bay Area becomes more and more apparent.

Ecology Action

The Ecology movement started organising last fail. I joined a group called Ecology Action which began discussions on campus. We learnt about food chains, eco-systems, the over-use of pesticides (which is an inevitable result of the one crop agriculture in which California specialises), how to make compost heaps out of organic garbage and how to recycle the rest. Ecology Action has sponsored a Survival Walk from Sacramento to Los Angeles. They started out 20 March and arrived in Los Angeles on 1 May. The walk was to call attention to the ecological crisis, serve as an organizing tool for local groups in the Valley, and be a public forum. While on the walk, they showed movies, slides, put on puppet shows, street theatre, and distributed literature. They planted wild flowers along the route and established plots of native grasses close to schools and colleges.

Ecology Action has also written a text called What's Ecology for high school teachers. It's being used in a pilot program with 450 students at one high school in the Bay Area and will be revised and published with a teacher's aid. I went to a teachers' workshop when the text came out to help familiarise the teachers with equipment available for teaching ecology. We showed them films, talked about how students could be taught ecological principles and what activities the class could take part in.

Ecology Action has an electrical car coop in the works and the latest plea from the Ecology Action Commune is for skilled engineers, mechanics, welders and fibreglass moulders to volunteer to help them. Ecology Action has helped save Aquatic Park, a place that sounds rather more charming than it is. On the filthy Berkeley Bay Shore, it's a small sanctuary for the hardy marine life that has managed to survive in the Bay. Last year all the fish in the Park were found floating on the surface, killed by hot water pollution from one of the Emeryville ("armpit of California") factories. Since then, the Park has been restocked and Ecology Action has tried to force the city to penalize polluters. There is, of course, a law against polluting the Bay but the Pollution Control Board keeps regular office hours. You should drive round the Bay on a Sunday afternoon. Ugh!

Clearance Creekwater Revival

Clearance Creekwater Revival was a programme in December for cleaning up the streams that choke their way down the Berkeley hills to the Bay. Thousands of students turned up and we tried to pull all the garbage out of the streams. The first difficulty we struck was fighting our way past all the TV cameras in order to get to the water.

Ecology Action is booming. It takes the slant that ecological catastrophe is the result of the capitalistic society with its planned obsolescence and consumer-oriented economy. Ecology Action is interested in promoting new life styles. Its leader, Cliff Humphrey, who used to be a leader of the Peace and Freedom Party in Berkeley, has organised the hard core ecology activists into a commune. The Federal Government was a little shocked at this as it had assumed ecology was a harmless all-American issue and allows conscientious objectors to do their alternate service with Ecology Action. (These guys have to work 40 hours a week and E.A. has absolutely no money for subsistence salaries).

Recycling seems the most practical and popular way people can help. Berkeley has organised recycling stations where people can take their flattened down, clean cans, their aluminium drink containers, their bottles, paper, even compost. The Coop has large recycling areas in the parking lots now. The campus has huge bins on wheels into which all the student newspapers are ment to go. Our own apartment building is now recycling all newspapers and we're arranging for boxes for cans, and bottles. The block we live on has regular block meetings to plan plantings of food in the various pockets of land around the apartment buildings. The latest move is to demand from all the block landlords that the fences come down so that Channing Way can have one long albeit very narrow garden common to all. We would be able to eat 'real' food for a change. A "Food Conspiracy" is working well now-you order your food and it comes wholesale from 'real' farms (not agribusiness factories). Organic food shops are springing up like mushrooms.

Earth Day

So there are plenty of ecologically minded people around here. Yet Earth Day, April 22, flopped badly. It was planned months in advance, and was to represent a wide variety of organisations. 42 groups had applied for booths. The highlight was an address by Senator Gaylord Nelson. Workshops, films, music, theatre, panel discussions, life style exhibits were planned. But only the panel discussions and speeches took place. Nelson's headliner speech, given in the vast King Auditorium, was heard by about 50 people. Why was this? The week prior to the festival, anti-R.O.T.C. (Reserve Officer Training Corp) demonstrations on campus turned into a mindless violence perpetrated by marauding bands of rockthrowers, vandals, and arsonists. About a hundred people were arrested. All you had to do was to choke on the air during a tear gas (or was it CS?) fight to realise that man is succeeding beyond his wildest dreams in destroying his environment. The Student President was arrested on a trumped up charge of "inciting to riot". The Berkeley chapter of the SDS was banned from campus but continued to hold illegal rallies, giving the cops an excuse to clobber anyone in sight. At the same time a Santa Barbara student was shot and killed in riots around the new temporary Bank of America in Isla Vista. Because of these events, an ad hoc committee coordinating the teach-in and fair issued a statement saying that "The spirit of the fair is considered out of context with recent events and could easily be exploited by factions that presently create and control the tensions and violence on this campus." Only the speeches were given but somehow these didn't seem very relevant after the confrontations and few people felt like braving possible tear gas attack to go to a lecture on what the Government is doing to clean up the air. The only group that was undaunted by the cancellation of the fair was the Ant-Farm Guerilla Fair which staged a simulated hydrogen bomb disaster on Earth Day.

This torn nation, blah, blah

But there's another reason why few people wanted to clap Gaylord Nelson. The students who are committed to improving the environment are worried about the fact that the Government is trying to co-opt the ecology movement. We're all sick of the line that this is the one movement that can unite this torn nation, blah blah. The axiom of the student movement is that the capitalist system is responsible for the mess the United States is in. Is it surprising that a system seeking to turn everything into gold ends up turning everything into garbage? We must buy less, share more, to save the non-returnable and non-refundable earth. But, although contradicting their principles, the corporations are climbing onto the bandwagon. The car manufacturers thrive on planned obsolescence and keeping up with the Joneses. Yet Henry Ford II says he has committed his company to researching automobile pollutants and has plans for building a $7.5 million research centre to study the problem. Meanwhile the Rouge River in Detroit flows on past the Ford works and carries its massive concentration of pollutants into Lake Erie. Dow Chemical spends vast amounts on combating pollution in its factories so that the napalm made there can be used to ruin Vietnam. I May's Daily Californian, the Berkeley campus newspaper, says: "If Americans continue to demand new cars every 3 years, and bigger and more advanced color television sets, efforts to curb pollution and to preserve resources will be as ineffectual as enrolling a pregnant teenager in a sex education class".

Nixon talking

Nixon is of course on the bandwagon but most students here feel that his war on pollution is nothing more than a public relations screen for him: while he pursues the Indo China War abroad and creates the conditions for unemployment at home he can talk conservation. If the Budget were candid the public would see that all the projected spending on welfare and pollution is peanuts compared to military expenditure. Defence still accounts for from a third to a half of total spending. Pollution control, in the budget, is buried in "natural resources" which altogether get one and 2/10ths of every dollar in the consolidated budget; that is one 10th of a cent less than last year! (figures from I.F. Stone.) Nixon's anti-pollution rhetoric is miles from his budgetary realities and no one here seems to be fooled.

In Berkeley, ecological living is regarded as a revolutionary lifestyle. Thousands of volunteers work to protect the Bay from fill and pollution, the Delta from the California Water Plan, the open space from new subdivisions and freeways. They don't expect any help from the Federal Government. They just wait for the revolution.

Janice Marriott

"Laos! Cambodia! Why can't we stay in Vietnam where we belong?"