Anytime of the day or night I can sit in my living room and watch as the freight trains go by within a 100 feet of my house. This stretch of track is called the low-line, one of the major east-west routes for rail traffic. Dozens of trains and hundreds of freight cars carrying everything from timber and ore to grain and the latest high-tech consumer goods cross Montana each day on their way to markets in every major city from Seattle to Boston. Last week, a train hauling chlorine, hazardous waste and other toxic chemicals for Stone Container derailed just north of here in the tiny community of Alberton on the Clark Fork River. The train wreck caused the second largest spill in history and led to the evacuation of a large area now referred to as the ╥hot zone.╙ The understandably irate residents of the hot zone have not been allowed back in to check on their pets and livestock and are spending their evenings at the local motels courtesy of Montana Rail Link╤the union-busting corporation that operates Montana╒s section of the low-line. Ironically, it was this tragedy that knocked the Unabomber off the front pages of the newspapers.
Toxic spills along the rail line are not unusual these days, and neither is the subsequent evacuation of nearby communities. It is cheaper to operate carelessly; accidental spills just get factored in as an acceptable risk. Spills do make great news, with drama and victims galore, but missing from this coverage is what happens when the chlorine isn╒t spilled but is instead utilized for the purpose for which it was imported. Every month, hundreds of tons of chlorine are used in the area╒s pulp mills to produce paper products for our wasteful society. The kraft pulp manufactured here is used for cellophane twinkie wrappers, rayon, photographic film and hundreds of other products. The sheets of finished kraft pulp are fluffy, white and pure as the driven snow and contain no large amounts of chlorine or other dangerous chemicals. So what happens to the chlorine? It goes out the smokestack, or the waste water discharge or into the landfill. That is, it is spilled deliberately into the environment as part of the cost of doing business and making a profit. Pulp and paper companies are now among the most profitable industries in the US and their bottom line continues to improve despite occasional spills, however risky or disruptive to nearby communities.
Because of this spill, the Department of Transportation will conduct a brief investigation in the coming weeks and probably will make a few safety recommendations to the train operator. Unless one of the engineers smoked a joint or ate a diet pill before showing up to work, no criminal charges will be pressed. At worst, Denny Washington, Montana Rail Link╒s owner, will get a small fine and some bad publicity. But he will be laughing all the way to the bank, and the chlorine cars are already rolling again along the low-line in front of my house.
Meanwhile, in nearby Lincoln, Montana, former home of Ted Kaczynski, the big news is not the Unabomber, but Phelps-Dodge╒s proposed Seven-Up Pete heap-leach, open-pit gold mine on the banks of the famed Blackfoot River. This mine will be the largest of its kind in the Rockies and, not so coincidentally, is sighted on land owned by the family of US Senator Max Baucus. Although Max denies any involvement in the project, he stands to make some good money if the mine is developed. Heap-leaching involves lots of cyanide, shipped in by rail cars. Of course, no one will be shipping out any cyanide, overburden or slag, only pure solid gold. The rest is for us to keep, always.
The heavy freeze this winter followed by an usually warm rainy period caused the thick ice on the Clark Fork River to break up and flow downstream, flooding and scouring the banks of the US╒ largest Superfund site and releasing huge amounts of heavy metals into a river just starting to recover from a century of mining abuse. The impoundments that failed, built only a decade ago, were supposed to withstand the effects of a 100-year flood. Then of course we have the Salvage Rider, which permits the largest timber corporations to steal live green trees off steep mountain slopes under the bogus argument that it will benefit ╥forest health.╙ You want violence and law breaking, we got it here in Montana! But don╒t look for it on the TV news or in the New York Times.
We shouldn╒t be surprised that the news media is more interested in a mad bomber than toxic terrorists. When someone sends a package by mail that blows someone╒s fingers off or kills them, that is news. When Denny Washington delivers a package by rail car containing chlorine or cyanide that may maim and kill many more, that is commerce. The media is fascinated with mayhem, as long as it is perpetrated by a lone crazy, a militant cult or a drug addict╤not a powerful corporate customer.
I am, by the way, opposed to both types of terrorism. But it makes me mad that only one receives media defamation and harassment from law enforcement, and the other receives legal protection and buys millions of dollars worth of air time. When Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney were injured by a pipe bomb designed to kill, the FBI arrested them, not the bomber. And when they dropped the charges for lack of evidence, they closed the case. Many other environmentalists have been assaulted and threatened with no action by the FBI. Wait a minute! Is this the same FBI that put a hundred agents on full time for a year to find the mad Unabomber? Could it be that the life of an environmentalist is not as important to the FBI as the life of a university professor or an airline employee? Mark Twain once said that a lie will make it halfway around the world before the truth even gets it shoes on. Is this the motivation behind the FBI leaks to the media?
The mainstream news media just isn╒t going to mend its ways anytime in the near future. For what it is, we are stuck with it until we can replace it with something better. Along with the steady diet of mayhem and street crime, there will always be an OJ trial, a baby hippopotamus at the zoo, a brave cat, a cute baby or a drug-addicted movie star more interesting to the jaded, corporate-funded news producers than a legitimate story about how corporations routinely rob, poison and maim people they╒ve never met, how they cover up their tracks and avoid responsibility and how they corrupt our democracy.
But take heart. Right before the collapse of the Soviet Union, Pravda was the world╒s largest newspaper. Problem was, nobody believed anything they read in it. Thankfully, blow-dried lackeys like Peter Jennings are not the only show in town. Network news and the New York Times, no matter how influential, don╒t have the credibility they once did. No matter where you live, you have access to the alternative press, which reaches people and communicates with them in a more meaningful way than ABC News, even without 20 million people viewing at once. We do it face-to-face, distributing our own media that can educate and activate the people we need to reach the most. I think it╒s important to remember that we don╒t usually radicalize people through our actions. People become radicalized by their own experiences. Organizing is more about uniting like-minded people in the exercise of political power than about changing people╒s minds.
No doubt a few people in Alberton, Montana will be a little bit more responsive when contacted by a local environmental group about the effects of paper mills and chlorine usage on their health and the environment. They are now far more worried about the reality of the lingering effects of a chlorine-and-toxic-waste cocktail than about the remote risk of receiving a bomb in the mail. As long as we are visible in our communities and are willing to communicate our message, we can reach people, one at a time, and we can build a movement strong enough to stop these toxic terrorists from ever hurting anybody again.
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The news media is finally starting to cover the zero cut debate now raging within the environmental movement. A recent story on the AP wire by Scott Sonner focuses on the ongoing fight for a zero cut policy in the Sierra Club. Recently, the Lewiston Morning News ran an editorial about the unlikely alliance between the Audubon Society and Earth First! in calling to end commercial logging on public lands. The editorial praised Dave Foreman for being willing to compromise with the timber industry on this issue while castigating the rest of the environmentalists for an all-or-nothing strategy. If I had read this a few short years ago, I would have dismissed it as an April Fool╒s prank. But things have changed. Foreman recently confided to an activist I know that the FBI is breathing down his neck. How this has influenced his change in position on zero cut, which he supported in his article for Clearcut: the Tragedy of Industrial Forestry and in past issues of Wild Earth is a mystery. Since his election to the Sierra Club Board, Foreman seems to have joined the good ol╒ boys club he once despised. But perhaps it╒s because he╒s gotten some irresistible party favors from the Club╒s inner circle. It seems he's gotten access to the Sierra Club mailing list to sell subscriptions to Wild Earth. Several members told me their Club membership numbers appeared on a Foreman fund-raising letter. Plus he gets a constant forum for his ideas in Sierra magazine. As one old-time Club member stated, ╥Foreman╒s rise to the top of the Sierra Club bureaucracy is unprecedented in the hundred-year history of the Club╙.
But it doesn╒t matter. Judging by the overwhelming victory it received in the ballot measure, zero cut is an issue whose time has come, and no backsliding or compromising is going to change that. Just a few months ago some people were talking about the ╥new Congress╙ as if it were an invincible, conquering army. We should expect less, they argued, because of the new political reality. Now those new congressmen and women are so much dead meat, having taken an unprecedented amount of money from the same corporate interests that they blasted on the campaign trail. And they haven╒t delivered any goods, either. We may yet have some new opportunities to push our agenda. Now is not the time to get squeamish, friends. Things are just beginning to get interesting again.
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