Reef, my 8 year old
son, and I pull out late from Two Rivers Camp, the stars twinkling
beyond the mountains as we drive north up the caliche road. We plan
to meet the leaders of the Toyavale Camp, a long over-due pow-wow and
a chance to get away. Two Rivers is on its 90th day. Since
Day 1, at least one in our family has been at the only current direct
action camp in Texas.
Reef sleeps now in
the back seat as I pull over at a roadside park with big trees, near
Fort Davis, a spot we'd once seen elk standing in the snow one winter
long ago. I lay out our sleeping bags in the truck bed and we roll up
close in the 1am cool. Stars between the branches. Every branch.
Spring Break souls
poured into Two Rivers from all over that week; young
environmentalist from Houston, Austin, Santa Fe, Denver and a blitz
of protesters from Standing Rock that included a tribe from Canada.
Hardcore. Their philosophy staged a rational conviction that
continued construction of fossil fuel infrastructure, the exercise of
feckless corporate power and business agents acting as elected
representatives of the people was not only unjust but a signature
that capitalism is out of control.
There is philosophy
and there is philosophy that fuels thought and action. At Toyavale
Camp it was monitoring the fracking frenzy of John Christmann's
Apache Corp.
To finance their own
drilling, Apache, is selling some of their lease options in the
454,000 acres they bought early on, potent acres that surround the
world's finest swimming pool – Balmorhea State Park. Christmann
told shareholders in Sept 2016 he'd spend 2 billion dollars in 2017
in the Alpine High mining fossil fuels. Coupled with the other
players, the activity was intense and Toyavale Camp has much to keep
busy.
Men are often chosen
as CEO's because of their confidence. Confidence is often distilled
through a disconnect with others – allowing ruthlessness to bubble
just below the swagger. And if you happen to be an oil&gas
executive, a disconnect with environmental reality helps too.
At Two Rivers Camp
the philosophy is direct action: protest – lock down, call out the
injustice of the American Corporate model, a model so outdated we
might as well light the whole Earth on fire. Kelsy Warren's ETP, is
destroying Texas with a lot of help from his cronies at the capitol,
and profits by killing the state's last frontier with a 143 mile
methane tube known as the Trans Pecos Pipeline. Seared across the Big
Bend wilderness, the legally mastered “public utility” affords
private gain by connecting the gassy denatured gray of the Permian
Basin environmental catastrophe with an export terminal in
Topolobampo.
Twenty-one public
protests events were staged in the first 90 days of Two Rivers camp's
existence including twelve felony arrests. The demographics of those
incarcerated, mostly 25 to 35 years old, many professional, mostly
Native, White, Latino, and LGBT, chose to be arrested for simple
exercising their first amendment rights. As the felony arrests
continue around the nation, many generated by camps such as ours,
authorities are actually creating a class of young people who now
will never qualify for the “American Dream.” And this creates an
even bigger subculture of committed protesters.
Stars – the story
of the Big Bend. Photons of past light penetrating the skies. Orion's
mighty Betelgeuse yellows in the night sky as Reef begins to snore.
The story of Texas
could not be more explicitly told than the story of the City of
Denton's recall on fracking. Railed by a fracking operation less than
a football field from a high school, the city changed their laws and
passed the ordinance to outlaw fracking within their city limits. The
day after that Tuesday, the Texas Oil&Gas Association sued the
city for “loss of profit.” The day after that, a state Bush sued
the city for “loss of oil&gas tax revenue.”A month later our
state legislature ruled by business agents, determined Texas cities
cannot change their ordinances to limit oil&gas production, even
if they're a stone's throw from a High School.
Texas is the epitome
of the one per cent sucking the blood of the 99 per cent. It is No.1
in industrial accidents, No.1 in pollution, and most likeliest state
to have people without a high-school diploma. 47 billionaires call
Texas home and pay the same rate of tax as a poor single mom. Our
governor's hobby is not fishing but suing the federal government to
protect the one per cent from federal oversight.
Meantime, as the
fracking frenzy continues in the Alpine High, the partners of the
McDonald Observatory, namely the University of Texas, sludge through
the process of dealing with oil&gas flares, trucks and tanks and
smells and smoke at the bottom of their mountain-mounted telescopes.
How does oil&gas deal with itself? In this case, the business of
astronomy and education have to justify the extra layer of grunge the
1 to 2 photons of hourly light from deep space have to pass through
to register at the lens.
Reef and I roll into
the Toyavale Camp the next afternoon and are greeted with handshakes.
We swap tales of running camps and could've gone on talking into that
hazy Reeves County night – but my son and I are thinking the same
thing – lets get on the other side of the mountain, find that tree
and collect a few more Z's of powerful star-photon sleep.
Their is nothing
sleepy about the most powerful entity in the world - the oil&gas
industry. The 20 billion tons of fossil fuels offered annually have
created an international network of players whose use of force
including war is second to none. And the twenty billion annual tons
of burned carbon add to the Greenhouse Effect and nudge
human-essential environmental negative feedback loops into reverse.
Twenty billion tons a year - in our finite space has consequences.
Scientists tell us once we hit 450PPM of Co2 in the atmosphere, we
may be out of business. We're at 405 today and currently adding 1PPM
per year.
And those mired in
myths including the Texas Myth still deny anthropomorphic induced
climate change.
If we change Texas
can we change the world?
Two hundred eighty
billion dollars were exported from this state last year, and over
half were oil field related. Moreover, our fresh engineers and other
specialists from UT, Texas A&M and Tech etc., move out across the
planet; Ecuador, Venezuela, Mexico, Iraq, Saudi Arabia exporting the
Texas ideology – slash and burn you might call it.
If we change Texas,
we can change the world.
Its a powerful force
this Texas and if we're going to change it and change the world we
should all think about joining or supporting some of these camps.
Camps are popping up nationally, internationally – direct action
camps who's sole purpose is to expose the injustice, peopled by youth
who are dedicating their lives to a re-visioned world and camps like
Toyavale committed to monitoring the extraction process so that
others can find the facts undiluted by corporate smear and state
government editing.
At the roadside park
near Ft Davis, Reef and I again watch the stars through the big tree.
A twinkle of hope, but just a twinkle.
