• Russian riot police broke up an Occupy-style protest against President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday, forcing dozens of people out of a central Moscow park where they had staged a week-long sit-in and detaining about 20 people. Protesters then moved to Kudrinskaya Square in Moscow, where they remain encamped.

• In Chile, a crowd estimated at more than 100,000 marched through the streets of Santiago on Wednesday to support the demands of the nation’s students.

• Thousands of student protesters flooded the streets in Montreal on Wednesday evening after Quebec Premier Jean Charest announced a proposal for a new ‘emergency law’ in a bid to end the ongoing 14-week-old student uprising and strike.

• About 2,900 Moroccan judges began a week-long strike to protest against judicial corruption and interference by the executive branch that they say undermines their independence.

• Two Greenpeace activists were arrested after being pried from a giant iPod in front of Apple’s headquarters Tuesday during a protest against using dirty energy to power data centers.

• Dozens of Spaniards lined up outside a bank in Madrid on Monday to close their accounts to protest the unfair seizures of homes.

• Israeli and Palestinian officials announced Monday that more than 1,600 Palestinian prisoners had agreed to end a nearly month-long hunger strike in exchange for concessions by Israel, including a modification to its practice of detention without charge or trial.

• A three-week-long protest on UC Berkeley agricultural research land in Albany came to a quiet close early Monday when police arrested nine protesters who had set up an urban farming camp.

Bhutan's Prime Minister Jigme Thinley (left) and Costa Rican president Laura Chinchilla at the UN, via AFP.

The monks of South Asia have been chanting on behalf of the happiness and well-being of all creatures for 2,500 years. Now, the spirit of those mantras has marched out of the monastery and into the streets, even into the halls of the United Nations.

Calling for nothing less than nonviolent resistance against the failed global economic system, the tiny Himalayan nation of Bhutan, sandwiched between India and China, took to the world stage last month by leading a “High Level Meeting on Happiness and Well-Being.” Its recommendation: Replace the Bretton Woods economic paradigm, imposed on the world by the United States in the wake of World War II, with an entirely new and inherently more just system.

The prime minister of Bhutan, Jigme Thinley, called on the people of the world to demand a change. Scholars, Nobel laureates, political actors, U.N. officials and staff, and spiritual and civil society leaders, many from the Global South, affirmed that the current system serves neither the human community nor other creatures on the planet.

“The GDP-led development model,” Thinley told the gathering, “compels boundless growth on a planet with limited resources.” Moreover, “it no longer makes economic sense. It is the cause of our irresponsible, immoral and self-destructive actions.” Finally, the prime minister concluded, “The purpose of development must be to create enabling conditions through public policy for the pursuit of the ultimate goal of happiness by all citizens.”

Most of the 600 in attendance shared Bhutan’s vision. Indian activist Vandana Shiva emphasized the importance of such a basic human need as food, the source of profit for a few and misery for many. As she has noted before, “The poor are not those who have been ‘left behind’; they are the ones who have been robbed.” The current paradigm creates a flow of financial, social, human and natural capital to the United States and other rich nations at the expense of everyone else.

Although Bhutan has faced criticism in the past for its treatment of Nepalese immigrants and the jailing of smokers, it has made considerable progress in recent years by establishing a new democracy and implementing creative efforts to measure its citizens’ well-being and happiness. The concept of Gross National Happiness was coined by the former King Jigme Singye Wangchuck, who abdicated in 2006 and set the democratization process in motion. To its credit, Bhutan is setting high standards for itself that may be difficult to reach, but the country is not alone in this endeavor.

Costa Rica’s President Laura Chinchilla gave the keynote address, sharing the experience of her country, noting, “In 1948 we decided to consolidate the best of our civic values, and abolished the army. We chose to solve our disputes through the ballots, not the bullets; we decided to invest in schools and teachers, not garrisons and soldiers.” Rather than decreasing the national security, “This uninterrupted path turned Costa Rica into the most stable and longest living democracy in Latin America.”

Interfaith spiritual leaders at the meeting, including the moderator of the Church of Canada and the Buddhist supreme patriarch of Thailand, as well as representatives from major religious traditions, issued their own statement calling for a new economic paradigm “based upon compassion, altruism, balance, and peace, dedicated to the well-being, happiness, dignity and sacredness of all forms of life.”

Meanwhile, economists John Helliwell, Richard Layard and Jeffrey Sachs distributed copies of the World Happiness Report. They argue, “We live in an age of stark contradictions. The world enjoys technologies of unimaginable sophistication; yet has at least one billion people without enough to eat each day.”

The official statement that came out of the meeting calls for a new paradigm with four pillars: ecological sustainability, happiness and well-being for all, fair distribution, and efficient use of resources. An unexpected 200 participants remained at the U.N. for two additional days to clarify what the new paradigm would look like, to propose new solutions, and to strategize how to mobilize a global movement in civil society to resist the current one and implement the change. Relevant civil society, educational, spiritual and activist organizations worldwide are being informed about the process, with an eye toward a 2014 convention that would replace Bretton Woods.

Widespread civil resistance movements would be a vital component in bringing about a shift toward so radically different a paradigm as this. Yet the meeting suggests that insufficient use has been made of the United Nations as a venue by change activists. Despite the U.N.’s obvious shortcomings — for instance, OWS recently protested the influence of corporations on environmental proceedings — it is nonetheless an infrastructure where every nation has a voice, at least in theory. Paradoxically, Global South elites who are also victims of the current economic paradigm provide an entrée into the system for grassroots activists, and this meeting demonstrates that the U.N. can offer a venue for radical critique. But the U.N. will only work on behalf of the people if the people insist that it does and begin to explore the possibilities that it might offer as a space for challenging injustice at a global level.

Dutch Rabbi Awraham Soetendorp, a long-time veteran of international meetings, observed that this one had “a different spirit” and that the time was ripe for unprecedented change. His call for a 0.01 percent donation of everyone’s income, especially from the rich nations, was received with enthusiasm by the civil society working group, which is creating a World Happiness Bank (a tentative name) that would promote and model the new economic paradigm.

This change will not happen, of course, without the mobilization of a nonviolent resistance movement. That’s where we come in; we have a new opportunity to act against a system that is robbing humanity and its fellow creatures through what the meeting’s statement calls the “private capture of the common wealth.” And we can do so by following the lead of the marginalized.

This week, thousands are descending on North Carolina for the Bank of America shareholders’ meeting. The protest comes on the heels of the successful Wells Fargo shareholder event in San Francisco, where thousands of protesters shut down the conference, and the U.S. Bank meeting in Minneapolis, where dozens of homeowners spoke out against foreclosures. A sequence of direct action trainings and spokescouncils will culminate in three marches at 8 a.m. on May 9, which will converge on the doors of the shareholders’ meeting. There, thousands will protest Bank of America’s laundry list of abuses: funding mountaintop coal removal, perpetuating student debt that has now surpassed $1 trillion nationally, laying off more than 100,000 workers in the last few years and, of course, foreclosing on millions of homeowners across the country. In anticipation, the Charlotte City Council has already passed laws criminalizing protest, as well as camping and carrying permanent markers.

Organizers are thinking about much more than just the shareholders’ meeting, however. Just as important as the mass action are the homeowners across North Carolina who are building a grassroots resistance network that will keep the pressure on the banks long after the May 9 action.

A month before the shareholders’ meeting, North Carolinian homeowner Nikki Shelton went face-to-face with an armed, 20-person SWAT team during the first home reoccupation in the state’s recent history. The action, organized by Mortgage Fraud North Carolina and bolstered by Occupy activists, is part of a growing wave of home takeovers occurring across the country, one that has spread from major urban centers all the way to enemy territory: the suburbs of North Carolina, mere hours from the international headquarters of Bank of America.

The foreclosure battle is both physical and psychological in North Carolina. People won’t talk about foreclosures outright; they tend to mention it evasively, as if in code. In the conservative suburban and rural regions of the South, housing developments exploded after World War II and homeownership is a way of life, both economically and culturally. For African Americans, homeownership is a particularly powerful symbol of freedom and upward mobility, and many tell stories of grandparents who grew up as slaves and, after emancipation, saved money to purchase a home for their family.

One fall afternoon in 2010, Nikki Shelton’s 17-year-old son broke the cultural gag order on the foreclosure crisis in a moment of unintentional organizing. Their neighbor, Marcella Robinson, was visibly pregnant and gardening in her front lawn, and Shelton’s son stopped to express his surprise at a pregnant woman doing manual labor. Robinson explained that it was soothing and that she was feeling pressure from being under constant threat from Bank of America and its subsidiary, Countrywide Financial. Shelton’s son told her that his mother, who lived only a few doors down, was going through the same thing. After making that connection, Robinson and Shelton started knocking on doors and learned that many of their neighbors were struggling not only with Countrywide’s adjustable-rate mortgages — a loan so dangerous that Countrywide executives revealed it to their staff only in a meeting in an underground bunker — but also outright fraud.

By the following May, Shelton and Robinson had assembled a group of more than 50 homeowners, Mortgage Fraud North Carolina, and held their first meeting in Shelton’s backyard. They had to meet outside because she and her family had been evicted from the home that Easter Sunday. A year later, the group would break the locks and reoccupy the house.

Shelton believes that the fight over foreclosures will require radical reeducation to completely transform how people think about the mortgage crisis. She’s tired, for instance, of reporters asking her how many mortgage payments she missed. (The answer is only one, in April of 2008.) Reporters never ask questions, meanwhile, like whether the bank illegally foreclosed on her through robosigning (it did) or whether crooked local lawyers and court clerks are aiding and abetting its fraud (they are).

Shelton sees all foreclosures as “fictional orchestrations,” a performance of greed and illegality that requires what she calls collective “conservative ignorance” in order to continue. The banks, lawmakers and the media reinforce the shame and silence that perpetuates this ignorance through intimidation (like the bank contractors sneaking around Robinson’s home taking pictures), violence (like the SWAT team that removed Shelton from her house) and the blaming of victims (like debates about whether principal reduction is a “moral hazard” for homeowners when the $7.7 trillion federal bailout doesn’t appear to pose such problems for banks).

As the efforts of Shelton and Robinson demonstrate, community building and education can spark direct action even in corners of the United States without long histories of housing organizing and where home ownership is deeply entrenched. The combination of large-scale protests, such as what is taking place at the Bank of America shareholders’ meeting, and on-the-ground homeowner organizing can turn symbolic actions into meaningful victories. In Minneapolis, for example, Occupy Our Homes combined a six-month grassroots campaign for the house of a woman named Monique White with a highly successful protest and speak-out at the U.S. Bank shareholders’ meeting. The result: Monique White won her home last Thursday — offering hope of similar victories for Shelton and other homeowners in North Carolina.

“Wall Street was not banking on the American citizens getting educated,” Shelton says. “They were not counting on us saying, ‘I know what’s going on.’ And now that they are starting to realize that we’re getting educated, that’s when the chaos starts.”

By Dave Id, via San Francisco Bay Area Indymedia.

As U.S. congressional leaders are hashing out the next Farm Bill in the Senate — an event that occurs every five years — farmers, activists, food justice advocates, environmentalists and many others are hard at work trying to salvage conservation and alternative farming programs from budget cuts. The bill, in all likelihood, will further hand the food system over to industrial agriculture and food producers. It has sweeping implications across the globe, affecting domestic and global food assistance, farmer crop insurance, conservation programs, commodity subsidies, and more. In essence, the Farm Bill props up the industrial food system, even as it contains small programs that support alternative and organic agricultural practices.

Last Sunday, when 200 people set out to grow food in the overgrown fields of the Gill Tract, a 10-acre agricultural lot in the East Bay neighborhood of Albany, Ca., owned by the University of California — and slotted for development — they were directly challenging the ethos of the industrial food system that the Farm Bill represents. The plan for the action, dubbed “Occupy the Farm: Take Back the Gill Tract,” was to celebrate Earth Day by turning this piece of rich agricultural land into a vibrant urban farm.

“You can’t just let people go out into the fields without telling them how to farm,” said Lesley Haddock, a UC-Berkeley student without any farming experience who joined the ambitious Take Back the Tract project. “But people just went out and started doing it — pulling weeds, roto-tilling. I was amazed. It was beautiful.”

At the end of the day, 15,000 donated seedlings had been planted and an occupation was emerging. Fifty or so people — complete with tents, a kitchen and a composting toilet — stayed on to protect the hard work of all the volunteers, including Albany residents, Occupy Oakland activists, UC students and community organizers.

The Gill Tract was once more than 100 acres but, thanks to encroaching commercial and residential development promoted by the university, very little of it remains. For more than 15 years, community organizers and citizens have tried to convince the university to preserve the land for agricultural purposes. According to Haddock, dialogue failed, so the farm occupation is their last-ditch effort to save one of the last pieces of good soil in the East Bay area.

“We are at the end of a struggle,” said Haddock, hopefully. She explained that formal communication with UC authorities about the tract has not occurred, adding, “Our communication is our occupation.” Last Wednesday, though, UC officials visited the farm and released a media statement demanding that the protesters vacate the land, along with allegations that occupiers were unsanitary in their handling of human waste (referring to the composting toilet, which is a viable method of ecological sanitation used globally). Take Back the Tract is inviting neighbors and the public to see for themselves what is going on with a “Farmland is for Farming Family Weekend,” including tours, teach-ins, activities and work opportunities.

There are no plans for this to be a long-term occupation. Take Back the Tract hopes that the university will allow them to use the land but is unsure what exactly it would take for a lasting hub for food production and education to permanently materialize. Take Back the Tract’s primary concern is food justice:

We are reclaiming this land to grow healthy food to meet the needs of local communities. We envision a future of food sovereignty, in which our East Bay communities make use of available land — occupying it where necessary — for sustainable agriculture to meet local needs.

In his article “Occupy the Farm: A Model of Resistance,” San Francicso educator and urban farmer Antonio Roman-Alcalá helps contextualize food sovereignty and the Gill Tract occupation in an unjust food system:

[F]ood sovereignty demands local and democratic control over our public institutions. And instead of a historically and logistically impossible division of “government” on one side and “markets” on the other, food sovereignty promotes a market that is accountable and humane because it is built up from the lives and decisions of those who are affected by it. This may all sound very theoretical, but land occupations like the effort to Take Back the Tract make these ideas real, immediate, tangible, and imaginable.

Anna Ghosh, communications manager with Food & Water Watch, works on advocating for a fair Farm Bill for consumers, farmers and the environment. According to Ghosh, what needs to change is who makes the rules that allow unchecked market consolidation by a small handful of corporations. Food & Water Watch publishes a useful primer on the Farm Bill and the corporate control of the food system.

“The work Occupy the Farm is doing is really important,” wrote Ghosh in an email, “because not only does it help people access good food, but it offers a great opportunity for people to learn more about what it takes to raise food and what is wrong with our current system.”

Confronting the kind of political power behind the tightly-controlled food system — which includes universities, corporations and the government — increasingly seems to require direct action tactics like occupation. The Gill Tract farmers and residents feel they know better than the UC Board of Regents what their Albany community needs: a farm. And those who work most closely with the land — the farmers, the ecologists, the conservationists — usually know best what the land needs: a better food system.

As the Gill Tract occupiers were coping with having their water shut off by UC authorities, “Mad Farmer” Wendell Berry — advocate of a 50-year farm bill based on ecological principles — was in Washington, D.C., delivering the Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities. In his comments, Berry suggested that Americans may tend towards one of two inclinations: “boomers” and “stickers.” In the parlance of Occupy, the boomers are the 1 percent — those who, according to Berry, are “motivated by greed, the desire for money, property, and therefore power.” He continues, “Stickers on the contrary are motivated by affection, by such love for a place and its life that they want to preserve it and remain in it.”

Those who occupy are stickers. They believe if something is the right thing to do, they have every right to do it. This is this sort of attitude that will foster food sovereignty and transform the system from a centralized, industrial one into a localized, sustainable model for living communities, economies and ecosystems.

Wendell Berry’s closing sentiments warned of the dangerous path we are on as the wheels of industrial agriculture and a corporate food system churn at breakneck speed. But, like the Gill Tract occupiers who’ve created a community farm in the shadow of commercial development, Berry tells us, “This has not been inevitable. We do not have to live as if we are alone.”

The 2012 Farm Bill will not go far enough in supporting a democratic food system because those who write it don’t have ties to the land or the neighborhoods that will be most affected.

“An economy genuinely local and neighborly,” declares Berry, echoing the vision of the Gill Tract farm, “offers to localities a measure of security that they cannot derive from a national or a global economy controlled by people who, by principle, have no local commitment.” Take Back the Tract seems like the perfect antidote.

An article published by CounterPunch yesterday, “Inconvenient Truths about Tar Sands Action,” argues that the grassroots campaign targeting the Keystone XL pipeline was nothing more than “a manipulated charade, funded and run with loads of money from pro-Obama Democrats through non-transparent organizations like the Tides Foundation.” It follows, then, according to the article, that the real goal of Tar Sands Action “was to manufacture Obama a ‘green victory’ during his first term in the run up to the 2012 election.”

In short, for those thousands of you who participated in the White House sit-ins or encirclement and became “True Believers in the mission,” you were duped. What you took part in “was not social change, nor was it grassroots empowerment.” You became nothing more than a name on an email list. You were “converted into clicktivists who will hopefully contribute money to the Obama ‘I’m In’ 2012 Presidential campaign, ecological landscape be damned.”

I’d ask you how it feels, but I should know. I’m one of you. The article mentions Waging Nonviolence along with the socialist group Solidarity and author Naomi Klein as being among the “principled radicals” who “drank the kool-aid.” So how do I feel? Well, for someone who has supposedly been drugged, I feel remarkably sober and unconvinced.

To believe that the Democrats mobilized thousands of people to get arrested as part of an effort to manufacture an environmental win for Obama is to ignore the fact that he rejected this gift-wrapped, hand-delivered win. He never fully acknowledged the claims of the campaign, and has recently spoken positively of the pipeline, thereby ensuring neither an environmental win nor the support of environmentalists.

Despite the joyous rhetoric  (“BIG NEWS: We won. You won.”) that emerged from the campaign after Obama’s November announcement that he would be delaying a decision on the pipeline until 2013, excitement has waned in the months since. More recent emails from organizer Bill McKibben have focused on the hard realities of the pipeline — for instance, Obama’s recent trip to Oklahoma, where he “lauded his administration’s fast-tracking of the southern leg of the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline.”

That doesn’t exactly sound like a campaign or a president working in cahoots. Yet, according to the author of the CounterPunch article who goes by the pseudonym The Insider, the two have been in lock-step, tricking environmentalists into doing the Democrat’s bidding. Never mind that the president hasn’t kept up his end of the bargain; the evidence of deception is clear to The Insider. For starters, there’s the fact that tar sands oil will be flowing into this country with or without the Keystone XL. So, since Tar Sands Action (TSA) is not targeting all entry points at once or trying to smash the whole industry at once, it is clearly just a sham. From The Insider’s perspective, TSA’s effort to build a mass movement from scratch through a series of concrete victories is irrelevant. What’s important is ideological purity.

This is where the Tides Foundation conspiracy comes in to play — which is where the article starts sounding like a Glenn Beck rant. While neither TSA nor its organizational affiliate 350.org received any Tides money (at least according to the document cited by The Insider), many of the groups that supported it did — for instance, the Sierra Club, NRDC and Friends of the Earth. Why does that matter? It boils down to Tides having “Democratic allied funders.” That’s the smoking gun. And apparently we can just take it on good faith that anyone who accepts money from Tides is actively working to reelect Obama. The proof is in the fact that some people showed up at the White House sit-ins and encirclement wearing Obama pins and shirts.

The Insider draws out this idea of co-optation further. “Tar Sands Action was a sophisticated, extremely well-funded model for creating the illusion of movement building, complete with mass civil disobedience,” the article contends, “but the real goal, mirroring its cousin, ‘The 99 Spring,’ was (and is) to hammer Republicans and fire up grassroots enthusiasm for Barack Obama’s re-election campaign.”

Co-optation is always a legitimate and serious concern, but as Nathan Schneider noted in regards to the 99% Spring, it’s important to ask, “Who’s co-opting whom?”

The logic of a civil resistance movement is always to co-opt the existing structures of the society around it, to radicalize them, to drive them away from the status quo and into doing something truly revolutionary. And it is precisely by co-opting these institutions that the movement is generally able to build enough capacity to make real change.

That’s how I’ve always seen Tar Sands Action: as a campaign that recognized the power of grassroots action but knew it needed the reach of the big green NGOs to be effective. As Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan, authors of the 2011 book Why Civil Resistance Works, point out, “The tactical and strategic advantages of high levels of diverse participation explain — in large part — the historical success of nonviolent campaigns.” So, to ignore the big greens and their massive base of supporters is to make your job as an organizer much harder. But to co-opt them, their email lists and their political influence is to give your campaign a huge boost.

Of course, doing so is not easy, despite what The Insider thinks about the Tides money that somehow made all the pieces fall into place. I recently spoke with Linda Capato, who handled recruitment for TSA, and she explained just how much the big green groups had to move outside their comfort zone to support the two weeks of civil disobedience.

We’ve always been told don’t do something that’s too nuts. Mass civil disobedience in front of the White House gates for two weeks, that’s crazy. Sierra Club isn’t going to sign on because of course they can’t. They have those mandates. NRDC isn’t going to be supportive. All these big greens are not going to come to the table and it was like okay, we can do it without them. And so it was this moment of let’s try. And then, as it was happening and as we were organizing, everyone was jumping onboard because it was a smart idea, it was the time to do it, it was the right target, the right strategy, and the right tactic.

That, ultimately, is what The Insider is overlooking. The Keystone XL was a strategic target which had a major leverage point in the president, since the decision was his alone to approve or reject. It was not meant to bring down the tar sands industry. To fault it for not doing so is like faulting the lunch counter sit-ins for not ending segregation. Furthermore, to say that “Martin Luther King must be turning in his grave,” is to deny that King not only appealed to the moral rhetoric of Lyndon Johnson but also met with him.

The TSA sit-ins and encirclement of the White House were hardly Obama campaign rallies. They were strategic actions meant to draw in a diverse crowd. A few radicals on tripods or in armlocks are wonderful, but to succeed, the effort needed a much broader coalition. Make no mistake, though, most of the organizers who helped guide TSA come from radical organizing backgrounds; for them, using the Obama rhetoric was a way to underscore the gap between the president’s lackluster record and his inspiring rhetoric.

That kind of messaging has far more potential to stimulate a mass movement than the kind of angry screaming that often takes place at protest and is why McKibben at one point said, “We are not going to do President Obama the favor of attacking him. We are going to hold the Obama campaign to the standard it set in 2008. Denying this pipeline would send a jolt of electricity through the people that elected this president.” That, to me, sounds like an attempt by TSA to co-opt one of the largest political movements in recent years and galvanize it into acting for the environment. But all The Insider hears is “well-funded, political theater and public relations.”

The problem with conspiracy theories in general is that they dismiss the contributions of ordinary people. Instead of giving credit to the participants in TSA for shaping their own campaign, which involved significant sacrifices both of time and body, the conspiracy theorist disparages those who took part as “rank-and-file day-to-day worker-bees.”

That’s simply not the case for Tar Sands Action. The reality is that as much as the campaign was about bringing thousands of people to the White House, it was also about empowering local communities to take their own action against the pipeline. ”A lot of the communities along the pipeline route are working together that haven’t before,” Linda Capato told me. “Folks in Nebraska who have been dealing with imminent domain are working with folks in Texas on the same issue. If the zombie pipeline does come back, at least we’ll have a lot more power and part of that power is these communities are talking to each other.”

The Insider concludes by quoting activist John Stauber, another skeptic of TSA, who says, “I would love to see the real people who have bought the hype and taken these civil disobedience trainings, and who have gone through the arrests, rise up and seize control of their own movement.” Perhaps he just needs to open his eyes.

"Testimony of Zea Maize," via the Midwest Radical Culture Corridor.

On April 21, approximately 100 people came to a courtroom in Iowa City to attend a mock trial called the Monsanto Hearings, the second of five such events scheduled nationwide. The trial was modeled after a preliminary hearing, an attempt to collect stories about harm caused by agribusiness giant Monsanto and determine if further public scrutiny is warranted.

The court’s five presiding judges — including a professor, a graduate student and an organic farmer — made no pretense of impartiality. “We are under no obligation to be even-handed,” they announced early on, “because in the court of public opinion, Monsanto is not even-handed. They have money for lobbyists, advertisements, corporate-funded research and media campaigns. The influence of this hearing, by contrast, depends on the power and truth of what is said.” The court, they explained, would not be considering legal violations, but rather violations of nature, ethics and human rights.

Untraditional as it might be, the hearing had an air of formality — the judges looked smart in their black robes, and witnesses swore to the truth before testifying, some in person and some over video. The first witness was a Vietnam veteran, trembling in a Hawaiian shirt, suffering from Hepatitis C linked to exposure to Monsanto’s Agent Orange (of which an active ingredient, 2,4-D, is a common lawn pesticide today); then a small farmer whose neighbor lost acres of organic crops due to pesticides drifting on morning fog; later, a garden and soil educator who brought a wooden box of soil and worms to the witness stand.

Other witnesses included professors, farmers, scientists and local activists. Their testimonies ranged from personal to technical, from stories of the approximately 200,000 Indian farmers who, indebted after Monsanto’s cotton seed prices rose from 7 rupees to 17,000 rupees/kg, committed suicide by drinking pesticide, to explanations of the influence of corporate agribusiness on U.S. land-grant universities and how minute manipulations of chemical structure have allowed Monsanto to sidestep health regulations. One man came dressed as a “superweed” — a plant that developed pesticide resistance after exposure to the chemical glyphosate — and lounged with his feet on the edge of the witness box. “I don’t give a fuck about Monsanto,” he said, swigging from a bottle marked “Roundup,” “though they do make a good drink.”

One common theme throughout the testimonies was the importance of adhering to the precautionary principle, which dictates that if an action (or, say, a pesticide or a genetically modified crop) has the potential to cause significant harm, it should not be implemented until it has been proven safe. The European Union mandates use of the precautionary principle when regulating chemicals and biotechnology, but the United States doesn’t, instead placing the burden on consumers to prove harm once the damage has already been done.

Which is, in a way, what the activists behind the Monsanto Hearings are trying to do. By using the courtroom as a public theater, they aim to spread knowledge and conversation within a region — the Midwest — that is heavily dependent on large-scale agriculture. I talked to the event’s main organizer, Sarah Kanouse, a member of the artist and activist group Compass. She cited a groundswell in public resistance to Monsanto’s products as an impetus for the hearing. “We wanted to see what an amateur legal proceeding would look like,” she explained.

The Monsanto Hearings are based on a robust international tradition of peoples’ tribunals that dates back 40 years to the Russell Tribunal, which examined human rights violations by the U.S. military in Vietnam. Because peoples’ tribunals are not legally binding, their main goal is to bring visibility to offenses that might otherwise go unseen or unrecorded, and to victims for whom legal protection has fallen short. By specifically adopting the mantle of a legal proceeding, a peoples’ tribunal can call attention to the insufficiency of the law when it comes to fostering social and environmental justice.

A similar Monsanto Hearing was held recently in Carbondale, Illinois, and more are planned for Chicago, Santa Cruz and St. Louis, near Monsanto’s headquarters. Footage from the Iowa City hearing will be shown this summer at dOCUMENTA13, an art festival in Germany, as a preliminary documentary, and a more polished documentary is also in the works.

The short-lived occupation of Duarte Square in New York City on December 17, 2011.

I’ve lately been getting the feeling that Occupy Wall Street’s past successes are starting to go to the heads of some people in the movement. There were, of course, the glory days of Liberty Plaza, and now also the spurt of momentum during and following the brief March 17 six-month-anniversary reoccupation there. But as the NYPD and police departments across the country make it quite clear that occupations of any kind will not be tolerated, the mood has gotten sour. The good old days, it seems, are not coming back.

For lots of organizers, I’ve noticed, the operating presumption is that occupation — something comparable to last fall but somehow surely better — constitutes a prerequisite to further political action. Consequently, a considerable amount of the energy of the most talented organizers in New York (as well as, evidently, in Oakland and San Francisco) has been directed toward failed reoccupation attempts. Or else the movement is celebrating its own anniversaries, not making occasions for new ones. The more conversations I have with listless, frustrated organizers, though, the more I start to feel that right now this occupation-first logic is exactly backwards.

This is a new time; the movement and people’s perspectives on it are in a totally different place than they were last fall. Potential allies expect more from the movement, I’d say, and so they should. People I know who were wholeheartedly behind it a few months ago seem to think it’s over, or it should be. The encampments, which Occupiers know as well as anyone sometimes turned into rather unsafe spaces, lost much public support. YouTube clips and statistics of Occupiers behaving badly in them have become fodder for a right-wing smear campaign that is gearing up for any possible resurgence. This matters; in some sense, an occupation must always be earned with public support, support which makes the cost in legitimacy too high for the state to mount an eviction.

Remember the early morning that so many remember as the climax of OWS’s whole story? It was October 14, when thousands of people turned out before dawn to keep the paws of Mayor Bloomberg’s cleaning crews off of the park. The moment those crews were routed, when the announcement came to everyone through the people’s mic — that was amazing. But it took a lot of committed allies to make it happen, beyond the usual characters you’d see around all the time. And right now, apparently, that support simply isn’t there, because evictions keep happening and there isn’t much of an outcry.

So how can the movement recapture that support? How can it, even more than before, light up people’s imaginations and make them want it to stick around? Here’s a modest proposal (modest because this is not a movement that tends to take or need advice): Challenge the power that affects lots and lots of people’s lives.

Right now, there are a bunch of smart projects starting up in the movement, each addressing core issues directly related to why so many thousands of people began Occupying Wall Street to begin with. There’s Fight BAC, a project with the (not at all modest) goal of taking down Bank of America. There’s the effort to fight foreclosures and evictions through occupations, auction blockades or eviction defense. There are groups like Disrupt Dirty Power aimed at finally halting the corporate machine that’s driving climate change. How about a massive student debt strike?

All of these are already in the works in the Occupy movement, but they tend to attract relatively small numbers of people compared to re-occupation attempts and rowdy marches. What if these, for a while, were the main business of the movement and the main outlet of its huge creativity? What if the first thing people thought of when they heard the word “Occupy” was, “Oh, those are the kids trying to take down the most dangerous bank in America and who saved my friend’s home from foreclosure”? Do stuff like this, and you’re creating a dilemma for the whole society. You’re asking everyone to choose sides — not about a little occupation, but about major features of everyday economic life. Do I want Bank of America to foreclose on my neighbor or not? Do I want my kids to spend their post-college lives enslaved by debt or not? These are serious political questions, which will easily eviscerate the nonsense the presidential candidates keep spouting on the news. Suddenly the question of letting the movement have an occupation somewhere seems comparatively small.

In the meantime, and in the process, it’s hugely important to keep the spirit of occupation alive — though not necessarily in tents. Union Square in New York is serving that purpose right now (especially when Occupiers there sleep on sidewalks in front of banks), as are the occasional afternoon Occupy Town Square events. May Day might be a great moment for rallying along these lines. This sort of thing is really important, because it’s constructive rather than just disruptive, and it points the way toward a new, revolutionary society. Lots of people in the movement talk about wanting to see these occupations eventually evolve into sustainable worker cooperatives and serious, large-scale mutual aid networks. But what if it were all in the context of making unmistakable the most egregious, fundamental crises in the fabric of our society — in the banks, in the schools, in politics, in how we treat our planet?

Compared to those sorts of things, I bet, encampments in parks will seem like no big deal. Maybe the movement might even start getting them again without really trying. At the very least, there will be a whole lot more people standing up against the forces of repression for the right to occupy. Hey, they’ll say, we’re changing the world with this movement — why not let it have a park or a building somewhere if we can do some good with it?

Thanks to Josh Fox and his documentary Gasland, lighting one’s water on fire has become the iconic image of the danger and devastation posed by fracking for natural gas. But what if the air is also catching fire?

For communities in the Marcellus Shale region, that fear became a reality last Thursday when the Lathrop compressor station in Springville, PA, exploded, shaking citizens’ homes and filling the sky with black smoke for several hours. Although the cause of the explosion is not yet known, pressure is mounting for a complete investigation that could lead to a halting of operations at the Lathrop station until it is deemed safe, as well as a push for closer review of other compressor stations using similar equipment.

Waging Nonviolence sat down with organizers from the Philadelphia-based Clean Air Council to learn more about these efforts and how they were informed by impassioned citizen-journalists, who arrived on the scene moments after the explosion.

In 2009, Mohamed Nasheed, the president of the Maldives (before being overthrown in a recent coup), held a cabinet meeting underwater. He sat at a table anchored to the ocean floor, wearing a wetsuit and oxygen tank, and signed a law meant to make the country carbon neutral within a decade.

The Maldives is the lowest-lying nation on the planet, with 400 miles of coastline and one of the world’s most densely populated capitals. It is, according to Rob Nixon, professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, an “invisible nation of no apparent consequence,” and as sea levels rise due to climate change, it may well be the first nation whose entire population becomes climate refugees. President Nasheed’s underwater meeting was a desperate attempt to catch the world’s attention, to add dramatic urgency to a process that, however disastrous, occurs over a period of decades.

The Maldives are far from alone: 43 island states have announced that, without swift global action against climate change, they face “the end of history.” From far away on a bright spring morning, this statement could easily seem hyperbolic — if it were heard at all. But for those at risk, it’s the frightening truth. And therein lies the challenge.

In Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Rob Nixon writes pragmatically about the difficulties in fighting what he calls “spectacle deficient” environmental crises like climate change, compromised ecosystems and toxic waste, whose victims are spread over place and time; the Maldives’s plight is only one of countless examples, and perhaps even more evident than most. These processes, Nixon says, are “slow violence”: pervasive, devastating — and unnoticed.

Just as slow violence is made invisible by its subtle pace and scattered impacts, its victims themselves are invisible, at least in the tiny and shifting lens of the world media. These are the micro-minorities, the shantytowns downriver from the manufacturing plant, the marginalized women in an already-marginalized society. Often, slow violence “occurs in the passive voice”; the suffering is a shame, of course, but it comes as a side effect rather than through the immediate action of any responsible party, leaving a convoluted trail of excuses and denial. Whose fault is it when a child goes hungry because his region has lost its topsoil and his family cannot grow food? Whose fault is a leukemia cluster that comes 10 years after and 100 miles away from any sort of disaster? I don’t know, but it’s not mine.

Each chapter in the book profiles a writer-activist who uses his or her writing to memorialize and call attention to a case of slow violence. In contrast to scientific or political reports, which are often written with such opaque language that they are inaccessible to both the victims they describe and to potentially-sympathetic outsiders, these writers use their work to build connections between their communities and the outside world, to make accessible that which is hidden.

We see Ken Saro-Wiwa, an Ogoni writer whose homeland in Nigeria was exploited for crude oil extraction, and who led a nonviolent campaign for environmental rights before he was put to death by the state. We see Wangari Maathai shaping Kenya’s Green Belt Movement as a feminist response to militaristic, male-dominated ideas of national security: “Losing topsoil,” she wrote, “should be considered analogous to losing territory to an invading enemy.” Nadine Gordimer’s short story “The Ultimate Safari,” about a group of refugees slipping through South Africa’s Kruger National Park, is read as a commentary on conservation refugees, the illusion of authenticity and the legacy of racism in South Africa’s tourist-oriented game reserves. The books and writers that Nixon profiles become opportunities for reflection, as he contextualizes each topic — dams, fossil fuels, depleted uranium — in terms of its global significance.

Nixon and the stories he tells also cast light on the differences between top-down and bottom-up environmental movements. “Full-stomach” environmentalism in rich nations, for instance, has tended to focus on the preservation of charismatic megafauna and majestic landscapes, often to the exclusion of the people native to those landscapes. This is the environmentalism of Priuses, debt-for-nature swaps, recycling campaigns and dreams of going “off the grid.” Poor-nation, “empty-belly” environmentalists, by contrast, “experience environmental threat not as a planetary abstraction but as a series of inhabited risks.” Although Nixon doesn’t address the environmental justice movement among poor and minority communities in the U.S. as an example, the principle is similar: environmental justice advocates, like poor-nation environmentalists, are often spurred to action by a direct threat to which the larger society — itself the perpetrator — pays little attention. There’s power to be gained by the two sides coming together, by environmentalists embracing the diversity of their causes alongside activists for women’s rights, minority rights and other rights discourses. If, as Maathai writes, “Poverty is both a cause and symptom of environmental degradation,” then each movement can be strengthened by joining forces with the other.

I thought the book was worth buying for its introduction alone, which presented the idea of slow violence and the practical and political challenges behind fighting it. The chapters that follow are a gallery of horrors: one scene of violence after another, each seemingly insurmountable and somehow less surprising than the last. Yet, remarkably, this is the least depressing environmental book I’ve read in years. By presenting these disasters alongside the writer-activists working to counteract them, Nixon leaves no room for despair. Instead I’m left buoyed, hopeful and — after 300 pages — impatient to learn more.

• In a march themed with fanciful allusions to Little Red Riding Hood, thousands of protesters swarmed Hong Kong’s streets on Sunday in the first large display of protest since the city’s elite tapped a Beijing ally to become the Chinese territory’s next leader.

• In the Dakotas, members of the proud Lakota Nation began a 48-hour hunger strike on Sunday in opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline — and all tar sands pipelines — they say will destroy precious water resources and ancestral lands in the U.S and in Canada.

• Jordanian authorities arrested more than two dozen political activists during protests Saturday critical of King Abdullah II that called for a change of government.

• An estimated 800,000 homeowners in Ireland joined a tax boycott by refusing to pay a new flat-rate $133 property tax by Saturday’s deadline.

• On Saturday, nearly 100 people wore hoodies in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania to protest the killing of Trayvon Martin.

• Thousands of Palestinians protested on Friday against Israeli policies of land seizure and control of Jerusalem, leading to clashes with Israeli troops in which a 20-year-old was killed and scores of others were injured.

• Three protesters were arrested Thursday at the UC Board of Regents meeting, when a few dozen activists, some stripped down to swimsuits, called for more transparency in state funding talks and an end to tuition hikes.

• On Thursday, hundreds of Bahrainis staged a sit-in outside the offices of the United Nations in Manama demanding action over the “excessive” use by police of tear gas against protesters.

• Some 50 students at the all-boys Frederick Douglass Academy in Detroit were suspended Thursday after walking out of classes in protest of absent teachers, inconsistent classroom instruction and other issues.

Memorial in Delhi to Ganhi's Salt March. By Tom Jordan, via Flickr.

What do Native Americans, Costa Ricans, Thai villagers, Hispanic students in U.S. colleges, Indian independence activists and Maasai women have in common? They’ve all organized long marches as part of campaigns for justice. Their campaigns’ very different choices about how to use the tactic raises strategic questions for us today. In some campaigns the long march was used primarily to heighten awareness, while in others it was to gain new allies. Sometimes it was used to launch other kinds of direct action. It has also been used at the end of a campaign, to escalate the pressure (just as a general strike is sometimes used). But what conditions make a long walk a truly effective tactic in a campaign, rather than just a chance to get some good exercise?

For me, that question is personal right now. On April 30, I will begin a 200-mile walk to the Pittsburgh, PA, headquarters of the PNC Bank to challenge its funding of mountaintop removal coal mining. The march is organized by the Philadelphia-based Earth Quaker Action Team as part of its BLAM! campaign: Bank Like Appalachia Matters! For that reason — and with the help of the Global Nonviolent Action Database — I’ve been reviewing the ways in which long marches like this have been used by others, with varying degrees of success.

One of the most recent long walks was taken by four Miami College undocumented students who walked from Florida to the U.S. Capitol in support of the immigration reform proposed in the Dream Act. They called their 2010 march The Trail of Dreams. They not only ended up expanding support for the legislation, but also stimulated five students to add an additional walk of 250 miles from New York to Washington, timed to arrive at the same time as the walkers from Miami. Although the Dream Act was not passed, the action certainly increased the momentum behind it.

In 2009, Tanzanian police set fire to eight Maasai villages to evict 3,000 people who were living on traditional land that the government secretly leased to a wealthy businessman from the United Arab Emirates for his hunting and recreation. Widespread protests were stonewalled by the government. Thousands of women in the region then decided to march back to the village area in April 2010; despite arrests and blockades along the way, 1,500 women made it. The women had as allies a network of NGOs, three leaders of which were arrested as well.

Also in 2010, Costa Rican protesters marched from San Jose to Las Crucitas, over 100 miles, to overturn a government decision that permitted open-pit gold mining. The stakes were high: A Canadian subsidiary wanted to mine an estimated $1 billion gold deposit, even though it would remove 600 acres of yellow almond trees — the main food for the endangered green macaw. The march, along with an occupation, hunger strike and other actions, forced a Congressional vote to ban all new open-pit mining projects, and in a court case the protesters won a ban of the Las Crucitas mine.

Most U.S. activists have heard of the 1965 Selma–Montgomery march in Alabama that brought to a peak a national crisis that forced the U.S. federal government to pass a voting-rights law to allow African Americans to vote in the South. The strategy in the previous cases I’ve mentioned was to use the long march as a “wake-up call” to mobilize a broader campaign for their cause. But in the 1965 civil rights movement, the long march was placed strategically at the end of the campaign, to escalate the pressure when allies around the U.S. were already mobilized.

A variety of tactics had already been used before the march: Alabama blacks showing up at voter registration offices even though they wouldn’t be allowed to register; sit-ins and picketing of white-owned businesses; short marches (sometimes even escalating to night marches — a highly dangerous tactic in that context); and other tactics usually involving tense confrontations and thousands of arrests. The young black protester Jimmy Jackson was shot and killed by police, and the white Unitarian-Universalist minister James Reeb was beaten to death.

The rising storm of protest around the U.S. forced the Attorney General in Washington to begin working on a voting-rights bill. President Lyndon B. Johnson urged Dr. King to de-escalate in view of the increasing violence. King, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and others in leadership believed that more pressure was needed. They planned a five-day march from Selma, which had been the center-point of the campaign, to Montgomery, the state capital of Alabama — since voting laws are usually decided by the state government.

The march would be extremely dangerous, passing through rural areas “owned” by the white terrorist organization Ku Klux Klan. Three hundred trained people were allowed to go the whole way, with the understanding that thousands could join on a day-by-day basis. Eight thousand people left Selma for Montgomery on March 21. Demonstrators marched through rain, singing and chanting, arriving safely on March 25, although the Ku Klux Klan murdered one more protester as she drove back to Selma.

This successful campaign spotlights two important strategic decisions: one was to place the timing of the walk near the campaign’s end, as a functional alternative to the tactic chosen in some labor-based campaigns: the escalatory general strike. The other was to base the campaign in a location other than where the power holders sit (in Alabama, the state capital, and in the U.S., Washington, D.C.). Because empowerment was a fundamental theme for civil rights organizers, emphasizing the grassroots rather than the seat of official power — and forcing the power holders to deal with the results — was often seen as most effective.

The Selma–Montgomery march was directly influenced by knowledge of the March to the Sea in India led by Gandhi in 1930. In that case, the long walk initiated the entire campaign: the Salt Satyagraha. The 240-mile march began at Gandhi’s ashram and ended at the sea, where the marchers made salt in defiance of the British Empire’s monopoly of salt manufacture. While the country was already well-organized and probably didn’t need the march to mobilize, the leadership wanted drama to kick off the campaign. The drama was provided by suspense: would the British arrest Gandhi or not? It was a classic dilemma demonstration. If the British arrested Gandhi they would make him a martyr and prove correct his claim that their presence was repressive and illegitimate. If they didn’t arrest him, he, the “Great Soul,” would be the first to make salt and defy the British. Either way, the British were in trouble; the campaign continued on a mass scale for two years and paved the way for India’s independence.

In Thailand, a rural campaign to re-open the Pak Mun Dam, whose construction had turned out to be an economic and ecological disaster for the region, used the long walk in the middle of the campaign. In 2000 the Assembly of the Poor first did a series of protests that culminated in seizing the dam and building villages there, preventing dam workers from gaining access. Although they had studies by academics and the World Commission on Dams to back them up, they realized that their struggle needed more allies, including among the urban poor, working class and middle class. So 150 representatives of impacted villages participated in a long march of 400 miles to Bangkok to win more allies. Once there, they began a hunger strike, created a mock village outside the seat of government, and did a “die-in” to dramatize their outreach.

Their success in winning allies even among the middle class resulted in the government not only compromising substantially — opening the dam gates four months each year — but also effectively ended new dam construction in the country.

In 1978, 26 Native American activists walked 3,000 miles in what they called the Longest Walk – from San Francisco to Washington, D.C. Thousands of people joined them at various points along the way. Symbolically they were reversing the Trail of Tears that marked the history of so many tribes, ejected from their homes by white supremacy and made to walk westward. Practically, they were walking to catalyze a new level of energy among allies, against the threat in the U.S. Congress. Congress was considering a set of 11 bills that would — once again — injure indigenous people in the U.S. The Longest Walk succeeded in blocking the bills.

The Global Nonviolent Action Database contains more campaigns that used long walks. Many activists have used this method, turning it into a tactic — as militaries use the term — by attaching it to a very specific objective. Campaigners in various situations have placed the long walk in the beginning of a campaign, or the middle or the end, making it serve one or another of a variety of campaign needs. Its strategic flexibility makes it tempting.

A downside is that effectiveness requires a great deal of organization, and many protest groups simply don’t have the infrastructure to carry it off to get what they want. I’ve known long walks that were intended to build allies but didn’t because the walk attracted hyper-individualists with nothing better to do than string along with the walk and alienate the potential allies along the way. Depending on the culture, those who initiate a long walk need to have serious skills in organization and conflict resolution. Depending on the level of danger, they also need skills in training. I was once called in to assist a group whose long walk resulted in several injuries and deaths among the walkers; we worked hard to build the capacity of the organization in nonviolent self-defense. In future walks, no one was killed.

The long walk is not the only method that has advantages and challenges to implement — most do. However, campaigners who rely simply on marches and rallies risk death by boredom, which is one reason why one of the most effective recent campaigns I know of began with a solemn agreement never to hold a march or a rally! Maybe a long walk is for you. Maybe you’d like to join us on ours? Follow #greenwalk and #m16 on Twitter for more details.

Photo by Alex Fradkin.

Sometimes justice requires a little imagination. On Saturday, when much of the Occupy Wall Street movement in New York was loudly denouncing police violence against minorities and protesters, a small group of environmentalists dreamed up a way to get the police to focus on the crimes of the 1 percent, to the point of arresting five corporate suits on United Nations property.

Granted, those five were actually members of the OWS affinity group Disrupt Dirty Power, which used Saturday’s action (billed as a “mock’upation”) to launch a month of actions targeting the “corrupt partnership between Wall Street, politicians and the business of pollution.” Police officers seemed thrown for a loop as they tore down tents bearing corporate logos and cuffed people who claimed to be from Bank of America and ExxonMobil. Compared to the rowdy anti-NYPD march earlier that afternoon, this time, the cops had more of a chance to think about what side they’re really on.

As the action began around 5 p.m., the police presence was focused on the small group of OWS protesters gathered in Dag Hammarskjold Plaza, a few blocks away from U.N. headquarters. The officers must have noticed the signs and banners, heard the people’s mic, observed the silly improv performance skewering corporate polluters and thought they were in the right place. But if they had paid closer attention, they might have seen where things were going.

At one point, a couple of “representatives” from Bank of America addressed the crowd, satirizing the bank’s all too real connection to the U.N. and its upcoming Conference on Sustainable Development in Rio de Janeiro this June. One of them announced:

The most exciting news of the day is that we have accepted U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki Moon’s invitation to permanently occupy the U.N. climate conference. Our hats go off to the Occupy movement for this concept of occupation, and we feel that we at Bank of America are well-equipped to realize the full free-market potential.

After wrapping up their discussion of the many ways Bank of America metaphorically occupies the U.N. to build a consensus around deregulation as the main vehicle for international development, the “representatives” invited the crowd to visit their physical occupation. As if that wasn’t quite enough to tip off the police, an OWS organizer then belted out the day’s objective:

Today when we march, we are not going to get arrested. We want the 1 percent to get arrested. We’re going to have fun and we’re going to put pressure upon this great institution. … And we’re going to be peaceful and jubilant to show just how peaceful we can be as opposed to this violent system.

Police officers then processed along with the protesters toward United Nations Plaza. But as soon as the march turned the corner, and the corporate tents came into full view, the officers took off, leaving the protesters in the dust. Within minutes the suit-wearing culprits were arrested beside their tents. Not having planned for this, however, the police had nowhere to put them. So while they waited for a van to arrive, the handcuffed 1 percenters stood and shouted to the protesters still marching peacefully across the street.

Bloomberg is in our pocket! … We control everything! … We have PR companies, the media, Obama, Congress! … I just invested $5 million in a Super PAC, I’m good! … We will be released soon, don’t worry! … Those are the occupiers you should be arresting!

Rebecca Manski, who helped organize the action and was among the five arrested, said the police really didn’t get that she and the others were just pretending to be corporate executives. “They were totally fooled by 1-percent appearance,” Manski explained. “They thought we were of a different class — maybe not the 1 percent exactly — but their perception was challenged of what a protester looks like.”

Rebecca Manski. Photo by Jim Lafferty.

Seeing the protesters in different clothes seemed to make a big difference. Some of the officers had just come from Union Square, where the situation was tense after a long, angry march from Zuccotti Park. Manski actually overheard her arresting officer talk about being called “a goon” earlier in the day. The officer could hardly believe that Manski and the other suits were from the same protest movement.

OWS legal consul typically advises protesters not to speak with police officers once they’ve been arrested, but Manski decided to bend the rules. She apologized for the name-calling and was treated so gently that she wasn’t even sure where she was supposed to go. Eventually, she found her way into the police van, where an officer actually told her, “I’m sorry we had to arrest you today. We support what you are doing.”

Once at the station, the arrestees continued to be treated well. Manski reports that when one officer began complaining that they were to blame for him having to work overtime on a Saturday night, another corrected him, saying, “No, it’s the banks’ fault.” The first officer ended up agreeing, and he added, “It’s the banks’ fault and the 1 percent’s fault.” Both officers then worked to get everyone released that day, when originally it seemed that some were going to have to spend the night in jail.

“They were getting the connection between the banks and abusive power,” says Manski. Much to her relief, the day’s action had brought attention back to the issues and those who need to be held accountable. She couldn’t help but wonder about possible next steps: “Wouldn’t it be great to have a whole march on Wall Street with everyone dressed as bankers?”

Photo by Jim Lafferty.

• Tens of thousands of students protested on Thursday against a 75 percent tuition hike at universities in Canada’s mostly French-speaking Quebec province, bringing downtown Montreal to a standstill. Since mid-February, nearly 300,000 students have boycotted classes, blocked bridges and held smaller protests around the province.

• More than 1,000 indigenous protesters reached Ecuador’s capital Thursday after a two-week march from the Amazon to oppose plans for large-scale mining on their lands. The protesters were joined by thousands of anti-government protesters in Quito.

• Hundreds of farmers gathered in the Vietnamese capital on Thursday to demand the return of rice fields they say were confiscated by heavily armed police just days after receiving an eviction notice.

• More than 1,000 people gathered in a downtown Brattleboro park on Thursday to call for the closure of the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant. It was the first day of the plant’s operation after the expiration of its 40-year license. Over 130 protesters were arrested for unlawful trespass as part of a civil disobedience action.

• More than a thousand people rallied in New York City’s Union Square on Wednesday evening with the parents of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed teenager who was shot dead in Florida in late February.

• Portuguese workers halted trains, shut ports and paralyzed most public transport in the capital Lisbon on Thursday to protest austerity measures and labor reforms imposed as a condition of a 78-billion-euro ($103 billion) bailout.

• Three Tibetans who have been on hunger strike outside the UN headquarters for the past month ended their protest Thursday after the UN said investigators would look into events in Tibet.

• Several people were arrested on Tuesday after a rally in a Phoenix intersection to protest immigration policies of Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio.

Graffiti on Jeju Island, via savejejuisland.org.

These guys are no joke. Tarak Kauff was a paratrooper in U.S. Army. Elliott Adams was in the infantry as a paratrooper in Vietnam, Japan, Korea and Alaska. Mike Hastie was an Army medic in Vietnam. Now they are all members of Veterans for Peace, and they just got kicked out of Jeju Island in South Korea.

The issue is no joke either. The United States and South Korea have teamed up to build a huge naval base on the beautiful, pristine island of Jeju — a bio-region so unique that UNESCO has identified nine different geological sites there as “Global Geoparks.” In the midst of this natural wonderland, the two military powerhouses want a deep-water harbor for the nuclear-armed Aegis destroyer and other ships that can menace China and protect Washington and Seoul’s strategic interests in the region.

As Tarak Kauff, one of the Vets, wrote in a reflection en route to Jeju last week:

The base will be part of the ever expanding U.S. military/economic global hegemonic plans to have a potent strike force directly off the coast of China. The U.S. has been an occupying force in South Korea since WWII, consequently imposing it’s political/economic/cultural and military will on the Korean people, this being just one more example of that. To get an idea of how violent and aggressive this is, imagine China or Russia building a naval base complete with missile carrying destroyers, say in Bermuda or Puerto Rico.

The resistance has been strong for seven years, ever since local people learned of the plans to build a port large enough for 20 battleships in their backyard. But international attention has been focused on the village of Ganjeong recently because, on March 7, 2012, the South Korean navy and Samsung started blasting out rock foundations along the coastline. This work is expected to last for the next five months and use 43 tons of explosives. Jeju Governor Woo Keun-min issued an official request to the South Korean navy to halt the blast of the sacred Gureombi volcanic coastline on Jeju Island, but he has been ignored.

The day after the blasting started, hundreds of people arrived on the island to engage in nonviolent resistance against the navy’s blasting. Activists have been lying in the road to stop construction vehicles, protesting peacefully and pressing their local and national legislators. There have been many arrests and activists have been handed heavy fines.

Tarak and the other Veterans for Peace did not get even that far. Immigration officials met the three of them on their plane when it landed on Jeju from Shanghai, China. They were detained, told they could not enter Jeju and put back on a plane to China.

“I am disappointed,” Tarak admitted. “The activists on Jeju were expecting us and looking forward to us coming. They have a high level of nonviolent resistance and I was really eager to be a part of it. I felt like my heart was already there.”

While activist military veterans like Colonel Ann Wright and Bruce Gagnon have been to Jeju before, this March delegation of Veterans for Peace marked the beginning of a new concerted effort by U.S. veterans to work in active and nonviolent solidarity. “This was to be the first project of our newly formed Veterans Peace Team,” said Tarak, “which we are organizing to bring veterans to confront and expose state and police violence domestically and around the world.” The mission statement for Veterans Peace Team reads, in part:

[We] stand in solidarity with … all peoples worldwide, who are standing up courageously, leading and often dying in the struggle for equality and justice as they are exposed to massive state run police and military violence.

In fact, the Peace Team is so new that their first training took place just a week before in Woodstock, NY. Longtime nonviolence trainer Joanne Sheehan, who heads the War Resisters League’s New England office (and is my mother-in-law) helped develop and facilitate the training, which will be used as a model for similar trainings around the country. This is a new kind of training, according to Joanne:

What touched me as a trainer was how aware the veterans were of stepping into harm’s way. We use that rhetoric in training and we role play hassle lines and other confrontations as a way of preparing people for the possibility of nonviolently encountering violence. But this was a room full of people planning to stand in front of police batons and say, “No, this is wrong,” and to use their position in society as veterans to absorb and expose the brutality of the state.

The show of force that the Peace Team was up against in Jeju has been extreme. In preparation for blasting to begin, South Korea sent hundreds of extra police to the island. Local activists estimate that between the indigenous police force and the mainland forces, there are now about 1,500 heavily equipped police in the village of Ganjeong — making a ratio of one officer for every villager.

Elliott Adams, former president of Veterans for Peace, was struck by the irony of the situation. “This is gratitude? I served in Korea with the 2nd Infantry Division defending the people from North Korea; I come back to again defend the people and I am pushed off into no-man’s-land.”

Reached by phone on Thursday morning, back in New York, Tarak Kauff told me about what it was like getting on the plane back to China:

The Chinese people on the plane were hostile and disrespectful towards us. They had been kept waiting for three Americans, they thought we were spies or something. It went on for a while and finally one guy was just totally offensive. I turned and explained to him that we were American military veterans, trying to get to Jeju to protest the U.S. and South Korean Naval Base being constructed there — abase that will be a threat to China. Well, everything changed and they were respectful and nice to us the rest of the way.

Back in the Shanghai airport, immigration officials held on to their passports and got them on an American Airlines flight back to Los Angeles. In the course of all of this it became clear that American was going to charge them $280 each to change their tickets. “Well, this would have added insult to injury,” Tarak says. “I explained to the supervisor — a Chinese woman — why we were forced to change our flight, and she waived the fees.” They did not get where they wanted to go, but they were able to reach out to lots of ordinary Chinese people with this message of international solidarity. It was likely the first time the Chinese had encountered U.S. peace activists.

The three Americans were not alone. The day before the veterans made their forced U-turn, Angie Zelter of the United Kingdom and Benjamin Monnet of France were deported from South Korea. Adams wrote in an email that Monnet “was forcefully dragged by about 10 immigration officers and left for the Hwaseong Immigration office that has a foreigners’ prison, in front of my and lawyer’s eyes.” According to the Yonhap News Agency:

Angie Zelter is accused of breaking into the construction site in Gangjeong Village on the southern tip of the resort island Friday evening after cutting down barbed-wire fences. … Meanwhile, French activist Benjamin Monnet allegedly trespassed onto the site and climbed a crane on the same day.

The South Korean military and police forces went to great lengths and considerable expense to prevent U.S. veterans from standing side-by-side with priests and nuns, villagers, students, monks and other international activists on Jeju. “U.S military veterans resisting the naval base obviously has significance,” says Tarak.

The veterans are now back in the United States, jet-lagged and exhausted after their ordeal, but they are not giving up. They protested at the South Korean Consulate  (335 East 45th Street, between First and Second Avenues) in New York City on Friday, March 16 at 12:30. If you couldn’t join them there, consider calling the South Korean embassy in Washington DC 202-939-5692 or 202-939-5600 to lodge a strong complaint about the denial of entry of three VFP members entry to Jeju Island. For information on upcoming Peace Team trainings, email Elliott Adams.

If you have ever read Dr. Seuss’s environmentally-themed children’s classic The Lorax — or had it read to you — perhaps these words will sound familiar:

“But now,” says the Once-ler, “now that you’re here, the word of the Lorax seems perfectly clear. UNLESS someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not!”

This message of individual responsibility has served as an introduction for many children to the idea of environmental stewardship. And now it is being spread to a vast audience on the big screen. When it premiered earlier this month, The Lorax was not only the biggest box-office debut in 2012, but also the biggest opening weekend in Universal Pictures history. Not bad for a story that condemns the voracious industrialism of the Once-ler, who clear-cuts the forests for the sake of shortsighted profits, and champions the Lorax, a forest creature who “speaks for the trees.”

But what about this message of individual responsibility as salvation? Is it really the radical fix our culture needs to save the planet? Or is it a message more befitting of a big-budget Hollywood film with 70 different product tie-ins?

To be fair, The Lorax is such a seminal work in environmental literature that it might be accurately called, as a recent Nature article put it, “a kind of Silent Spring for the playground set.” It is therefore not surprising that when Seuss wrote it in 1971, he drew upon the emerging field of ecology — which promoted a “holistic” worldview where people are inextricably linked to their environments. He also addressed issues of economic externalities, property rights and consumer demands. A close reading of The Lorax reveals advanced economic and ecological ideas, elevated by colorful photos and poetic prose.

Nevertheless, there is another aspect of his analysis that is a product of its time: individualism. It’s no coincidence that the 1970s is remembered as the “Me Decade” — a time when many activists emerging from the counterculture of the late 1960s became disillusioned with political activism. Indeed, Charles Reich’s 1970 bestseller The Greening of America argued that a shift in individual consciousness was essential for ecological social change. Perhaps the most concrete example of the counterculture’s influence on modern environmentalism comes from the title of Reich’s book: the term “green” (as in Green Party and green consumerism).

Stewart Brand’s classic 1968-1972 Whole Earth Catalog offers perhaps the best example of this depoliticization and turn to individualism. The catalog promoted a wide range of energy-saving devices, appropriate technology, and other environmentally friendly tools for saving the planet. The same year The Lorax was published, Brand said, “Individual buyers have far more control over economic behavior than voters.” Brand’s emphasis on individual responsibility (rather than political solutions) and technology is central to contemporary American environmentalism. Today, thoughtful politicians can barely even phase out inefficient light bulbs — much less legislate comprehensive solutions — and every environmental problem is addressed with a technical solution.

Like the Whole Earth Catalog, The Lorax suggests that environmental destruction is both a personal shortcoming — such as the ethical failure of the Once-ler — and a personal responsibility — exhibited by the small boy, who at the end, is entrusted to replant the forest. While the moral force of an individual is essential to nonviolent social movements such as environmental justice, the myopic focus on individual responsibility too often obscures systemic problems.

I don’t mean to suggest that the personal actions people take to reduce their environmental impact are pointless, but rather to argue that these actions have the unfortunate tendency to render environmentalists complacent. I’ve known too many people who bike and recycle, and think they have done their part. This is known as the “single action bias.” As Columbia University’s Center for Research on Environmental Decisions discovered, when people react to a threat like climate change, they often rely on just one moderate action, such as riding a bike. The researchers concluded, “People often take no further action, presumably because the first one succeeded in reducing their feeling of worry or vulnerability.”

This often leads into another shortcoming of individual action called the “rebound effect.” Too often, conscientious consumers — myself being no exception — save money on energy efficiency, then immediately turn around and purchase more products with the saved money.

Recycling is another virtuous and well-intentioned environmental act, but it too often becomes an end in itself, a sacred act devoid of a larger context. Because only 3 percent of the total waste in the United States comes from municipal sources (and not all of that waste is recyclable), if everyone were to religiously recycle 100 percent of all recyclable products, 99 percent of the solid waste would still remain. We too often celebrate recycling, and neglect the more important actions of reducing and reusing. Ultimately, we need to challenge our disposable culture of hyper-consumption that creates these vast mountains of waste.

Fortunately, there are resistance- and awareness-raising efforts underway, such as with Buy Nothing Day, No Waste Day, Boycott Black Friday and Reverend Billy’s Church of Stop Shopping. But it will take more than living simply and rejecting “commodity fetishism.” We will also need to build and strengthen our communities because, as the venerable environmentalist Bill McKibben has argued, “individual actions don’t add up to enough.”

Imagine if we had lists of “Ten Things You Can Do to Save the Planet” that included “organize a group of your friends and meet with your community leaders” or “engage in a direct action protest at your local coal plant.” It’s this idea of communal cooperation, as opposed to isolated efforts, that gives rise to powerful social movements. A perfect example is the Green Belt Movement, which was initiated by the late Kenyan environmentalist and 2004 Nobel Laureate Wangari Maathai. By connecting individual actions — undertaken as part of a larger group mission — with larger social imperatives, Maathai and her Green Belt Movement planted over 40 million trees and in the process challenged a corrupt government and exploitative industries.

Perhaps the final scene of The Lorax can be read with this in mind. As the future of the forest — the last “Truffula tree” seed — is entrusted to a small boy, he is instructed to “Plant a new Truffula. Treat it with care. Give it clean water. And feed it fresh air. Grow a forest. Protect it from the axes that hack. Then the Lorax and all of his friends may come back.” After all, that’s an awful tall order for just one person.