Plenty International- The Blog » Updates

AMBULANCE FOR HAITI

plentyinternational — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 22:23:11 +0000

Alex Miller, an EMT from New Mexico, spent time in Haiti after the earthquake working for a clinic in the town of Petit Goave near Port-au-Prince. He realized the clinic could use an ambulance for transporting patients so when he returned to the U.S. he began to fundraise for one. Longtime Plenty donor and former Plenty volunteer with the Plenty Ambulance Service in the South Bronx 30 years ago, Robert Reifel heard about Alex’s effort and decided to contribute through Plenty. In the photo above Robert presents Alex with a check for $2,000, money that helped buy the ambulance. The two are holding up a display of pictures of the ambulance and of the clinic in Haiti.

US Senate Report Says Haiti Rebuilding Has Stalled

plentyinternational — Sun, 27 Jun 2010 00:11:41 +0000

US Senate Report Says Haiti Rebuilding Has Stalled

By Jonathan M. Katz, Associated Press Writer – Mon Jun 21, 2010

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti – Haiti has made little progress in rebuilding in the five months since its earthquake, because of an absence of leadership, disagreements among donors and general disorganization, a U.S. Senate report says.

Obtained Monday by The Associated Press, the eight-page report is meant to give Congress a picture of Haiti today as U.S. legislators consider authorizing $2 billion to support the country’s reconstruction.

That picture is grim: Millions displaced from their homes, rubble and collapsed buildings still dominating the landscape. Three weeks into hurricane season, with tropical rains lashing the capital daily, construction is being held up by land disputes and customs delays while plans for moving people out of tent-and-tarp settlements remain in “early draft form,” it says.

The report was written by staff of Sen. John Kerry, the Massachuetts Democrat who is chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and other Democrats who interviewed U.S., Haitian, United Nations and other officials and visited resettlement camps, hospitals and schools throughout the quake zone.

“While many immediate humanitarian relief priorities appear to have been met, there are troubling signs that the recovery and longer term rebuilding activities are flagging,” said the report, which is scheduled to be released Tuesday.

Three times it says the rebuilding process has “stalled” since the Jan. 12 disaster.

The report also criticizes the government of Haitian President Rene Preval and Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive, saying it has “not done an effective job of communicating to Haitians that it is in charge and ready to lead the rebuilding effort.” The report calls on Preval to take a “more visible and active role, despite the difficulties.”

Bellerive responded to the criticism in a Monday interview with the AP. He said officials are working hard behind the scenes to ensure reconstruction does not simply mean the rebuilding of barely livable slums.

“We understand the impatience and we are the ones more frustrated than anybody,” the prime minister said. “It took some time. I believe four months (since a U.N. donors’ conference in March) to plan the refoundation from such a disaster is pretty acceptable.”

With a chuckle, he also said it is unfair for U.S. officials to take him to task when the Senate still has not approved aid money that Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton promised at the donors’ conference.

“They ask me to move more projects when the money is still on hold,” Bellerive said.

In all, just 2 percent of the $5.3 billion in near-term aid pledges have actually been delivered, up from 1 percent last week.

The report expresses concerns that even once the money is in hand, it will not move quickly enough to help. The funds are managed by a 26-member reconstruction commission led by Bellerive and former U.S. President Bill Clinton that started its operations last week.

While the report calls the commission the “best near-term prospect for driving rebuilding,” it also says the panel “has the potential to dramatically slow things down through cumbersome bureaucratic obstacles at a time when Haiti cannot afford to delay.”

The report notes disagreements among donors over strategy, approach and priorities, saying the disputes “are undercutting recovery and rebuilding.”

The reconstruction panel includes representatives of donors who pledged at least $100 million in cash or $200 million of debt relief, including the United States, Venezuela, Brazil, Canada, the European Union, the Inter-American Development Bank and the World Bank.

Bellerive said the report’s criticism that the panel has been too slow in organizing is already moot. “We had a meeting, we have an office, we have administrative support,” he said.

One thing on which all parties agree is the importance of November elections. The legislature has almost entirely dissolved after members’ terms expired because the quake forced the cancellation of February legislative elections. Preval’s five-year term ends next February; an attempt to prolong his term by several months if elections are not held resulted in protesters clashing with police in front of the ruins of the presidential palace.

Failing to hold the November elections on time, even despite the losses of the electoral commission’s headquarters and records, could imperil “Haiti’s fragile democracy,” the report says. But it expresses limited optimism that a plan for holding the vote is “apparently imminent.”

How BP, Big Oil and the Feds Screw Louisiana to Bring You Cheap Gas

plentyinternational — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 04:03:40 +0000

How BP, Big Oil and the Feds Screw Louisiana to Bring You Cheap Gas
By Adele M. Stan, AlterNet Posted on June 4, 2010, Printed on June 26, 2010 http://www.alternet.org/story/147101/
The first time I saw New Orleans, it was an empty city, save for the National Guard troops and Blackwater mercenaries patrolling the storm-ravaged streets. It was September 16, 2005, a little more than two weeks after the winds of Hurricane Katrina pushed the waters of the Gulf of Mexico up into the heart of the city via the Mississippi Gulf River Outlet, where they met the contents of the Industrial Canal in a fatal mix, overtopping the levees that were all that stood between the waterway and the death by drowning of the city’s storied Ninth Ward.
The stench of rotting things pervaded the abandoned streets, which were coated in a powdery residue of salt, left behind when the Gulf waters receded back into the drink.
It was abundantly clear that the nation had failed the city, under the leadership of a president who at one time fancied himself to be an oilman. What I didn’t know was that the disaster set in motion by the hurricane, which itself had bypassed the city, was ultimately caused by our nation’s greed for oil.
Oil and Water
While Big Oil didn’t create Hurricane Katrina (unless you factor in the possible role of global climate change in the creation of Katrina), it was the alteration of the New Orleans landscape at the behest of petroleum giants that caused the city’s destruction during the 2005 storm.
Oil exploration off Louisiana’s coast began in the 1940s, and was in full swing by the 1950s. In 1962, the federal government leased a large swath of underwater land in the Gulf for oil exploration, claiming jurisdiction over portions of the oil-rich Gulf that lay beyond the three-mile offshore limit allowed the state of Louisiana for its own control.
“Oil companies acquired almost 2 million acres of new leases, much of them in unprecedented water depths (the average water depth of leases in the 1962 sale was 125 feet, compared to 67 feet in 1954-1955 and 89 feet in 1960),” according to a 2004 report (PDF) by the Department of Interior’s Mineral Management Services. By 1963, 90 drilling operations were in progress, according to the report, and the industry was, by one estimate, spending $1 million a day for drilling, a princely sum at that time. (Today, more than 27 million acres of the Outer Continental Shelf off Louisiana’s shores are under lease for drilling.)
In 1965, at the urging of the companies excavating oil and petrochemicals in the Gulf of Mexico, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet (abbreviated as MR-GO, and known colloquially as “Mr. Go”), a broad waterway that provided a shortcut between the Gulf and the ports of New Orleans, allowing large tankers to avoid the twists and turns of the Mississippi River. At 76 miles long, the building of MR-GO was “a larger dirt-moving project than the Panama Canal,” according to Joby Warrick and Michael Grunwald of the Washington Post.
What Corps engineers called Mr. Go climatologists named Hurricane Highway — a perfect conduit for a storm surge. If you were looking to engineer the flooding of New Orleans during a storm, you would have designed MR-GO.
It was a tragedy predicted by scientists, and compounded by the fact that MR-GO, as an avenue of commerce, was essentially a bust, little traveled in the last three decades by its intended clients.

For years before Katrina’s winds destroyed much of New Orleans, environmentalists — and the editorial board of the city’s paper of record, the Times-Picayune — called for the closure of MR-GO. Three months before the storm, Hassan Mashriqui, then a researcher with the Louisiana State University Hurricane Center, announced that MR-GO could amplify storm surges by 20 to 40 percent, according to the Post. And that’s exactly what happened.
Environmentalists had long advocated MR-GO’s closure, citing the detrimental environmental effect of the waterway, which caused devastating levels of erosion and the destruction of marshes and estuaries. The giant canal released salt water from the Gulf into the city’s freshwater marshes — marshes that protect the city from flooding during storms — killing many of them. MR-GO was decommissioned and dammed last year, but it still remains an environmental hazard.
Oil and Deep Water
Barely a year after the paint on the “MR-GO IS GONE” signs dried, BP’s Deepwater Horizon rig exploded in April, unleashing another environmental horror on Louisiana.
On Thursday, according to Allen Powell II of the Times-Picayune, black oil with the consistency of cake batter was reported for the first time in Barataria Bay, near Grand Isle, which is part of Jefferson Parish. “It’s no longer sheen or tar balls,” [Jefferson Parish Councilman Chris] Roberts said Thursday evening, Powell reported. “It is thick black cake-mix type oil.”
Fishermen hired by BP to help contain the oil are becoming sick from exposure to the oil and dispersants.
The Washington Post’s Rob Stein reports that nine workers were hospitalized last week after complaining of nausea and dizziness, but the long-term repercussions could be far worse:
“There’s no way you can be working in that toxic soup without getting exposures,” Hugh Kaufman, a senior policy analyst at the EPA’s office of solid waste and emergency response, said during an interview Thursday. He likened the response to previous toxic waste disasters and the World Trade Center cleanup, which left workers with long-term respiratory problems despite repeated official claims that workers did not need respirators because the working conditions were safe. “It’s unbelievable what’s going on. It’s like deja vu all over again,” he said.
Long-term exposure to the chemical mix churning through the Gulf could lead to disorders of the nervous system, as well.
As the oil makes its way to shore, there’s no telling how the toxic winds that brought it, and the poisoned swamps left in its wake will affect the health of the people of the Gulf Coast. The health of Louisianans already ranks dead last in the nation among the states, and along the coast, it’s about to sink even lower.
The Louisiana death toll for Hurricane Katrina varies according to how you measure it, but it’s safe to say that more than 1,000 people died in the storm, and likely many more.
Mental illness continues to be a major problem in post-Katrina New Orleans, and the stress experienced by residents who endured the storm but lost everything — including access to medical services — is doubtlessly taking its toll in the form of stress-exacerbated illnesses, such as heart disease and hypertension.
How many more thousands will suffer in the years to come from the BP spill, the largest environmental disaster the U.S. has ever known? No one knows, but you can bet that from upticks in the incidence of respiratory disease to an increase in mental illness, the people of the Gulf will experience all of it, and likely endure infirmities as a result of this disaster that we have yet to imagine.
Show Them the Money
Louisiana, according to the Web site of the Louisiana Mid-Continent Oil and Gas Association, is the third largest producer of crude and the second largest producer of natural gas, if you include the federally administered leases in the Gulf of Mexico, off Louisiana’s shore. Add its oil production to its refining operations, and you’ll find that Louisiana either refines and/or produces one-fifth of the nation’s oil, according to Timothy J. Haney, a professor of sociology at Mount Royal University in Calgary.
Writing for Truthout of the environmental debt owed Louisiana by the rest of the nation, Haney, a former New Orleans resident, makes the point that if Louisiana were an independent nation, its oil riches would render it a very wealthy one indeed. Instead, Louisiana has more residents living under the poverty level than any other state except Mississippi, its neighbor on the Gulf. Yet in terms of its gross domestic product, Louisiana ranks ahead of Connecticut, which is the nation’s third wealthiest state.
The poverty of Louisiana’s people and the paucity of its coffers are due in part to the fact that Louisiana, unlike a number of other oil-excavating states, receives no revenues for most of the oil extracted just off its shores; those undersea wells are claimed by the federal government, which in turn claims the riches, the royalties, from the leases of the seabed to such oil giants as BP. More revenues would mean more money, say, for education, a critical element in creating a diverse economy. According to the National Center for Educational Statistics, Connecticut ranks fourth in the nation in its per capita elementary and secondary education spending, while Louisiana ranks 38th.
In 2006, Congress passed a law that will allow Louisiana to claim revenues from those rigs, but the measure doesn’t kick in until 2017. In the meantime, Louisiana is left to struggle with inadequate resources against disasters as monumental as the flooding wrought by Hurricane Katrina at the invitation of Mr. Go, and the explosion of BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil rig.
Adding insult to injury is the disaster-industrial-complex that grew in the aftermath of Katrina, whereby outsiders were brought in to clean up and rebuild, while native Louisianans were left to idly wallow in their own devastation. Louisianans fear the same will happen with the cleanup of the BP spill, even as those who once earned their living fishing are deprived of their livelihoods.
Even so, you won’t hear many Louisianans bad-mouthing the oil industry. The state’s economy is utterly dependent on the petroleum giants for jobs directly tied to the industry, and the economies of services that spring up around dominant industries in any region.
For the people of Louisiana, the oil industry is the company store — the only game in town for the fundamentals of economic survival. According to the Louisiana Mid-Continent Oil and Gas Association, the petroleum industry accounts for $65 billion of Louisiana’s economy. Compare that to the $2.4 billion brought in by fishing, and oil wins, hands down.
If the destruction of wildlife, livelihoods and, indeed, cultures wrought by the explosion of BP’s Deepwater Horizon were the only price paid by Louisianans for our nation’s petroleum jones, that would certainly be too much. But the cost borne by the people of the Gulf Coast today is but one installment in a long string of assaults by the oil barons on some of the nation’s most distinctive landscapes and some of its oldest cultures.
While Americans pay about $3 per gallon for gasoline, the actual cost for each of those gallons — costs measured in environmental destruction, illness, military protection for supply lines, and the clean-up of “natural” disasters resulting from climate change — is around $15 per gallon, according Lester Brown, author of Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing To Save Civilization, as cited by Haney in his Truthout piece.
A good bit of that cost is carried by the people of Louisiana.
Louisiana as a Modern-Day Colony
To the rest of America, Louisiana is a little bit strange, and a good bit foreign. Its Creole, Cajun and African-American cultures are among America’s oldest, after the American Indians; their English is laced with words heard nowhere outside the region and their cuisine is unique.
Then there’s the music. Infused with the rhythms of West Africa combined with the instruments of Europe, New Orleans music, be it jazz, rock, blues or pop, has a sound all its own.
When I returned to New Orleans in 2006 on the one-year anniversary of Katrina, Cyril Neville, the virtuoso percussionist of the Neville Brothers, explained it to me like this: the rest of America, he said, “they don’t see us as part of the same country.” In fact, he posited, New Orleans is functionally “the northernmost port of the Caribbean.” Indeed, New Orleans and the surrounding Gulf Coast share more culturally with the nations of the Caribbean than, say, with the states of New England or the Midwest, or even a southern state like Virginia.
Louisiana once had a shot at claiming a share of oil revenues from the Gulf of Mexico, in a compromise that House Speaker Sam Rayburn, D-Tex., tried to broker in 1949. But Leander Perez, the local Democratic Party boss of Louisiana’s Placquemines and St. Bernard Parishes (and a segregationist), would have none of it, seeing how his representation of the compromise as a grab by the federal government played to his personal and political fortunes. In alliance with a similarly minded Texas attorney general, Perez succeeded in scuttling the deal, leaving Louisiana with nothing.
I recount all this in an effort to work out why a region so loaded with riches is deprived of its share in them. It’s hard to imagine that happening off the northeast U.S. coast; there the oil barons and the federal government would never get away such a rape of entire cultures and their natural legacy.
But more than any other port in America, New Orleans exemplified the commodification of people and nature’s bounty that was the engine of the colonial system. There, the riches of the Caribbean — rum and sugar — were traded alongside those of the American South — cotton, rice and tobacco.
And there the nation’s largest slave market thrived, selling people fresh off the ships from Africa, or just off the plantation.
The truth is, the everyday, regular people of Louisiana are used to being treated like crap. African Americans and American Indians there always faced great peril; the white Cajuns arrived as refugees from Canada in the 1760s, and their distinctive culture and language (and their dedicated preservation of it) still sometimes renders them suspect in the minds of non-Cajun whites. (It’s bad enough that they insist on speaking French, but it’s not even regular French.)
Yet Louisiana is fantastically American. Much of the music that screams “America” to the rest of the world was born thereabouts: jazz, blues and rock ‘n’ roll. As an economic engine for the place the United States occupies in the world’s economy, the Port of New Orleans played an historic role. And Louisiana today supplies a mighty portion of the oil and gas that fuels America.
On the eve of President Obama’s first visit to the Gulf Coast last week to examine the destruction wrought by BP’s deep-water well explosion, the editorial board of the New Orleans Times-Picayune pleaded its state’s case, arguing, “We can’t wait till 2017 for the resources we need to save our imperiled coast. We and other oil-producing coastal states must start getting the 37.5 percent share of oil and gas royalties from new drilling in the Gulf now. Not seven years in the future. Not when it’s too late and there’s nothing left to save.” They continued:
Twice in the past five years, Louisiana has been knocked to its knees by disasters rooted in the quest for oil. Our bill has come due.

Adele M. Stan is AlterNet’s Washington bureau chief.
© 2010 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved. View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/147101/

Rubble of a Broken City Strains Haitians’ Patience

plentyinternational — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 20:27:54 +0000

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/30/world/americas/30haiti.html
By DAMIEN CAVE

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — With graffiti and protests, from sweltering tents to air-conditioned offices, Haitians are desperately trying to get a message to their government and the world: enough with the status quo.

The simple phrase “Aba Préval” (Down with Préval, a reference to Haiti’s president, René Préval) has become shorthand for a long list of frustrations, and an epithet expressing a broader fear — that Haitians will be stuck in limbo indefinitely, and that the opportunity to reinvent Haiti is being lost.

While few have given up entirely on the dream that a more efficient, more just Haiti might rise from the rubble, increasingly, hope is giving way to stalemate and bitterness. “Is this really it?” Haitians ask. They complain that the politically connected are benefiting most from reconstruction work that has barely begun. They shake their heads at crime’s coming back, unproductive politicians and aid groups that are struggling with tarpaulin metropolises that look more permanent every day.

“We’re going to be in this position forever,” said Patrick Moussignac, the owner of Radio Caraïbes, a popular station broadcasting from a tent downtown. “We could be living on the streets for 10 or 20 years.”

Government officials have repeatedly called for patience. And among American and United Nations officials, there is a sense that Mr. Préval and his deputies have become more engaged, putting in long days at an annex behind the damaged presidential palace.

United Nations officials now calmly predict that elections will take place by the end of the year, but no clear alternative to Mr. Préval has emerged.

But in the meantime, until the next government takes office? “We are in a period of perilous stagnation,” said Robert Fatton Jr., a historian at the University of Virginia who was born in Haiti but is now an American citizen.

Parliament is now essentially disbanded; power lies with Mr. Préval, his cabinet and a reconstruction commission led by the Haitian prime minister and former President Bill Clinton.

Haitians are not especially pleased. Freshly painted graffiti on main thoroughfares now declare “Aba Okipasyon” (Down With the Occupation) and call for the ouster of NGOs, or nongovernmental organizations.

Mostly, Haitians say they just want someone in charge, telling them what to expect. “The people need a response,” said Michèle Pierre-Louis, the prime minister under Mr. Préval until last year. Because the president has not told families in tents or business owners what they might receive to rebuild, she said, “they do not know where he is leading them.”

Missed opportunities are beginning to mount. Immediately after the earthquake, Ms. Pierre-Louis said, Haiti’s central bank should have guaranteed loans or loosened its collateral requirements to help small businesses trying to reopen.

Before Parliament closed, she added, lawmakers could have made it easier for members of the Haitian diaspora to invest — perhaps by easing rules requiring that joint ventures be 51 percent Haitian-owned.

That might have opened the country to more people like Alain Armand, 36, a Haitian-American lawyer from Fort Lauderdale, Fla., who is now trying to open several businesses here in Port-au-Prince, the capital, including a bed and breakfast.

Trying is the operative word, he said: “It costs $3,000, and it takes at least three months to get incorporated. There is no organized structure in which we, outsiders to NGO-land, can operate.”

Even within “NGO-land,” disappointment is settling in. Complaints about the government dragging its feet over decision-making are common. Reconstruction so far has mostly amounted to an emergency response in the form of plastic. About 564,000 tarpaulins had been distributed as of early May, enough to cover an estimated 1.7 million people; or laid out lengthwise, to run from New York City to past Albuquerque.

The tarpaulins are an enormous help, as the drenching afternoon rains begin, but they are they are not safe or strong homes. “In the beginning, we felt like it was fine for us,” said Gaela Rifort, 30, outside her tent in Pétionville, a suburb of Port-au-Prince. “But now, they are not enough.”

The urgent demand for more can also be seen in the perfectly formed piles of bricks that suddenly appear each day, like giant termite mounds, in the middle of major streets. Initially, rubble in the roads came from the earthquake; now it is a sign of property owners clearing their land.

Garnier Daudin, 69, a taxi driver who owns an apartment building tipped on its side in Carrefour-Feuille, a neighborhood in the capital, said he had no choice but to move it to the street. “I have renters,” he said. “It’s been five months, and the government hasn’t told me anything.”

Looking toward a nearby intersection, he added, “When we drop it there on the main street, the government will have to come get it.”

Or so he hopes. In many areas, piles that were once on the street have been pushed closer to the curb, and left there. One large mound on Route de Delmas has been walked over so many times in the past few months that bricks have been flattened into a dusty gray path — which runs by shoe sellers like Manoucheka Walker, 22, who said “the government left the pile with us” because “the government doesn’t care.”

Just behind her, on a rusty blue fence, a large “Aba Préval” had been painted in the bright red of the Haitian flag.

Reconstruction workers seem to be just as exasperated. The United Nations estimates that the quake destroyed 105,000 homes, and damaged 208,000 others, mostly in Port-au-Prince. That is a lot of rubble for the roads.

Indeed, when this reporter followed one of the new mango-colored dump trucks assigned to reconstruction, it rerouted around several of them, delaying its arrival at a canal where it collected trash pulled from the ravine to prevent flooding.

Haitian professionals like Frank St.-Juste, 48, an engineer who owns a construction company, had hoped for more. He said he thought the earthquake would lead to a more open, pragmatic government with stricter bidding procedures, urban planning and international standards.

Instead, he said he was being paid to clear damaged homes by a friend who has a contract with a nongovernmental organization that he declined to name. “It’s not the right way to do it,” he said.

At the time, he stood beside a backhoe that he owns, on a hilltop beside Fort National, which is one of the neighborhoods hardest hit by the quake. He said his company was the only one assigned to the area. It was nearly dark and he was still working, but his temporarily broken-down backhoe and four trucks were hardly adequate for the densely packed neighborhood with hundreds of pulverized homes.

Asked how he chose which property to clear first, he said, “We have to start somewhere.” Later, like so many others, his mood darkened.

“There is no sense of priorities or sequencing,” he said. “There is no master plan.”

Gulf of Mexico oil spill reinforces the industry’s bad will for American Indians

plentyinternational — Wed, 19 May 2010 16:49:37 +0000

Gulf of Mexico oil spill reinforces the industry’s bad will for American Indians
By The Associated Press
May 18, 2010, 6:55AM

Like many American Indians on the bayou, Emary Billiot blames oil companies for ruining his ancestral marsh over the decades. Still, he’s always been able to fish — but now, with the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, even that is not a certainty.

An oil spill — 5 million gallons and counting — spreading across the Gulf of Mexico has closed bays and lakes in Louisiana’s bountiful delta, including fishing grounds that feed the last American-Indian villages in three parishes. It is a bitter blow for the tribes of south Louisiana who charge that drilling has already destroyed their swamps and that oil and land companies illegally grabbed vast areas.

Only 26 families remain on the island today.

“Once the oil gets in the marshes, it’s all over, that’s where your shrimp spawn,” said Billiot, a wiry fisherman with tough hands, his fingernails caked with bayou dirt. “Then we’re in trouble,” he said in a heavy French-Indian accent.

In the month since an offshore drilling platform exploded, killing 11 workers, BP PLC has struggled to stop the leak from a blown-out underwater well. Over the weekend, engineers finally succeeded in using a stopper-and-tube combination to siphon some of the gushing oil into a tanker.

In Pointe-Au-Chien, 60-year-old Sydney Verdin felt a tingle of vengeful satisfaction at BP PLC’s misfortune over the oil spill.
“I’m happy for the oil spill. Now the oil companies are paying for it the same way we’ve had to pay for it,” said Verdin, disabled by a stroke, as he sat in his living room and watched his grandchildren play.

Even before the leak, oil’s influence on the south Louisiana landscape was unmistakable. Signs warning about underground pipelines are everywhere. So are plastic poles in canals to show the pipelines’ location. Out in the marsh, oil and gas facilities are often the only lights visible at night.

Since the 1930s, oil and natural gas companies dug about 10,000 miles of canals, straight as Arizona highways, through the oak and cypress forests, black mangroves, bird rushes and golden marshes. If lined up in a row, the canals would stretch nearly halfway around the world.

They funneled salt water into the marshes, killing trees and grass and hastening erosion. Some scientists say drilling caused half of Louisiana’s land loss, or about 1,000 square miles.

“If you see pictures from the sky, how many haphazard cuts were made in the land, it blows your mind,” said Patty Ferguson, a member of the Pointe-Au-Chien tribe. “We weren’t just fishermen. We raised crops, we had wells. We can’t anymore because of the salt water intrusion.”

As companies intensified their search for petroleum in the 20th century, communities where the Choctaw, Chitimacha, Houma, Attakapas and Biloxi tribes married Europeans in the 1800s have seen their way of life disappear.

“This is not a two-week story, but a hundred-year story,” said Michael Dardar, historian with the United Houma Nation tribe. “Coastal erosion, land loss and more vulnerability to hurricanes and flooding all trace back to this century of unchecked economic development.” Oil companies have long argued that their drilling in south Louisiana consistently was approved by federal and state agencies and did not violate the law. Most attempts to get oil companies to fill in the canals have failed in court. Land claims have proven hard to win because south Louisiana’s American Indians have not won recognition as sovereign tribes by the federal government.

The damage didn’t end with the canals. U.S. Geological Survey scientists say sucking so much oil and gas out of the ground likely caused the land in many places to sink by half an inch a year. In boom days in the 1970s, Louisiana’s coastal wells pumped 360 million barrels a year, an eighth of what Saudi Arabia ships to the market today. Oil wells also discharged about a billion gallons daily of brine, thick with naturally occurring chemicals like chlorides, calcium and magnesium, as well as acids used in drilling.

To many Indians, oil has meant an unmitigated disaster.”They never done nothing for me,” Billiot said. Pointing across canals and open water at the village’s edge, he said: “You see where all that water is: It was all hard ground. You could walk from here all the way out there. They started making cuts, the water come in. It didn’t take too many days to make a canal. A big machine and they’re done. One little stream of water here, after so many years it eat up, and that’s why everything is wide open right now.

“

Wenceslaus Billiot remembers when farms and forest covered the island.

In addition, American Indians say land and oil companies seized swamps that rightfully belonged to them. They’ve sued unsuccessfully to regain vast areas now owned by large landholding and energy companies. Joel Waltzer, a New Orleans lawyer who’s worked on an aboriginal land claims lawsuit for the Pointe-Au-Chien tribe, said Indian tribes were so isolated they missed the opportunity to claim ownership of swamplands after the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. “They were not English speaking; they were completely illiterate and they had no means to make it to New Orleans and make their claim,” Waltzer said.
Much of south Louisiana was claimed by the federal government and sold off at 19th-century auctions to land companies. By the 1900s, oil companies bought much of the land in south Louisiana. Allegations abound among Indians that oil companies hoodwinked them into selling even the small bits of land they owned.

Flag flying on Isle de Jean Charles.

“They take the land. That was years ago,” said Ranzel Billiot, a 30-year-old shrimper and one of Emary Billiot’s cousins. “A lot of the older people they took the land from didn’t know how to read or write.”About 40 years ago, Verdin, the 60-year-old from Pointe-Au-Chien, his father and a cousin took shotguns and stood in the way of a Louisiana Land and Exploration Co. marsh buggy crew digging a trench that was about to go through a nearby Indian burial ground. “We said: If you go one more step, you’ll risk your life,” he recalled. “They didn’t go through the burial ground. I can’t think of one Indian who ever made any money from oil.”

KIDS TO THE COUNTRY Celebrates Earthday

plentyinternational — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 22:42:36 +0000

Kids To The Country launched its 24th year in Tennessee on Earthday Saturday, April 17, 2010, at the Carver Food Park, Garden and Compost Site, in the Greenway along I440 at 10th Avenue and Gale Lane in Nashville. About a hundred folks attended and enjoyed a beautiful day in the park.

94-year-old Mr. Ellis leads a circle Earthday blessing.

Three girls.

Watering a bed.

Earthday folks chat.

L. to R. Joe Harris, Crystal Miller, Ginger and Luke Sands

Peter Kindfield builds a fire for the vegie burgers.

Kids on stage.

Watching the action with Umsullamah.

Sizwe Herring and Mary Ellen Bowen.

Elaine Langley, RN, back from Haiti

plentyinternational — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 18:00:08 +0000

Plenty medical volunteer, Elaine Langely, went to Haiti with a team from the Louisiana/Haiti Sustainable Village project and worked with a Haitian EMT, two other volunteer nurses and an American doctor in a makeshift clinic in the southern coastal town of Cayes Jacmel. These are some of the photos she and a Haitian friend shot during her stay.

Elaine poses with kids outside clinic.

Elaine gives medicine to a little girl.

clinic waiting room

Elaine and friends

Wilma Mankiller, Cherokee Chief and First Woman to Lead Major Tribe, Is Dead at 64

plentyinternational — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 15:14:42 +0000

Wilma Mankiller, Cherokee Chief and First Woman to Lead Major Tribe, Is Dead at 64
April 6, 2010
By SAM HOWE VERHOVEK
Wilma Mankiller, who as the first woman to be elected chief of a major American Indian tribe revitalized the Cherokee Nation’s tribal government and improved its education, health and housing, died Tuesday at her home near Tahlequah, Okla. She was 64. The cause was pancreatic cancer, said Mike Miller, a tribal spokesman. Ms. Mankiller was the Cherokee chief from 1985 to 1995, and during her tenure the nation’s membership more than doubled, to 170,000 from about 68,000.

While many Cherokees live in a 14-county area around the tribal capital of Tahlequah, in eastern Oklahoma, its members are spread throughout the 50 states. The current tribal membership is 290,000, making it the second-largest tribe in the country after the Navajo. Ms. Mankiller was admired for her tenacity, having fought off two serious diseases, lymphoma and a neuromuscular disorder called myasthenia gravis; recovered from kidney failure that would have killed her had not an older brother given her one of his kidneys; and survived a head-on automobile collision in 1979 that forced her to endure 17 operations and years of physical therapy.

“We are better people and a stronger tribal nation because of her example of Cherokee leadership, statesmanship, humility, grace, determination and decisiveness,” Chad Smith, the Cherokees’ principal chief, said in a statement on the tribe’s Web site. “When we become disheartened, we will be inspired by remembering how Wilma proceeded undaunted through so many trials and tribulations.” Wilma Pearl Mankiller was born on Nov. 18, 1945, in Tahlequah. She was the sixth of 11 children reared by Charley Mankiller, a full-blooded Cherokee, and the former Clara Irene Sitton, who is of Dutch-Irish descent. (The Cherokees accept anyone as a member who can link any part of his or her ancestry to a member of the original tribe.)

She spent her early childhood on a 160-acre tract known as Mankiller Flats, given to her grandfather as part of a settlement the federal government made for forcing the Cherokee to move to Oklahoma from their tribal lands in the Carolinas and Georgia in the 1830s. The name Mankiller comes from a tribal military rank.

Though Ms. Mankiller later recalled that she had never really felt poor growing up, the family’s home had no electricity, indoor plumbing or telephones.
In 1956, the family moved to San Francisco as part of a relocation policy of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Its aim was to move Indians off federally subsidized reservations with the promise of jobs in America’s big cities. Ms. Mankiller’s father became a warehouse worker and union organizer.
In an interview with The New York Times in 1993, Ms. Mankiller described the move as “my own little Trail of Tears,” a reference to the forced removal of Cherokees from the Southeast by federal troops during the winter of 1838-39.

In 1963, she married Hugo Olaya, an Ecuadorean businessman, and later became the mother of two daughters, Gina and Felicia. Her life changed, she said, when a group of young Indian demonstrators took over Alcatraz to call attention to the government’s treatment of Indians. They claimed the island “in the name of Indians of all tribes,” and during their 19-month occupation Ms. Mankiller visited them frequently and raised money for their cause.

She began taking night courses at Skyline College and San Francisco State University while working as a coordinator of Indian programs for the Oakland public schools. After her marriage ended in divorce, she returned with her daughters to live on her grandfather’s land in Oklahoma in 1977.
Soon she began volunteering in tribal affairs and leading campaigns for new health and school programs, like Head Start. She landed a job as economic stimulus coordinator for the Cherokee Nation, emphasizing community self-help. She also earned a bachelor’s degree in the social sciences from Flaming Rainbow University in Stilwell and took graduate courses in community planning at the University of Arkansas. In 1981, she founded the community development department of the Cherokee Nation and, as its director, helped develop rural water systems and rehabilitate housing. Her successes led the tribe’s principal chief, Ross Swimmer, to select her as his running mate in his re-election campaign in 1983. Their victory made her the first woman to become deputy chief of the Cherokee Nation.

When Mr. Swimmer resigned two years later to become assistant secretary for Indian Affairs at the Department of the Interior, she succeeded him as principal chief. She won office in her own right in 1987 and in 1991 was re-elected with 83 percent of the vote.

As the tribe’s leader, she was both the principal guardian of centuries of Cherokee tradition and customs, including legal codes, and chief executive of a tribe with a budget that reached $150 million a year by the end of her tenure. The money included income from several factories, gambling operations, a motel, gift shops, a ranch, a lumber company and other businesses as well as the federal government. One of her priorities was to plow much of this income back into new or expanded health care and job-training programs as well as Head Start and the local high school.

Even after she left office in 1995 because of her health problems, Ms. Mankiller remained a force in tribal affairs, frequently sought out for counsel and helping to mediate a bitter factional fight between her successor and other tribal leaders that had threatened to become a constitutional crisis in the Cherokee Nation. She also was a guest professor at Dartmouth College.

In addition to her mother, she is survived by her husband, Charlie Soap; her daughters, Gina Olaya and Felicia Olaya, both of Tahlequah; several brothers and sisters, and four grandchildren.

In 1998, President Bill Clinton awarded Ms. Mankiller the Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor. Her life story was chronicled in “Mankiller: A Chief and Her People” (St. Martin’s Press, 1993), which she wrote with Michael Wallis. She was also the author and editor of “Every Day Is a Good Day: Reflections by Contemporary Indigenous Women” (Fulcrum Publishing, 2004).
William Grimes contributed reporting.

Charting US Wealth/Income Disparities

plentyinternational — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 17:13:39 +0000

Plenty volunteer Elaine Langley, RN is in Haiti

plentyinternational — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 16:20:50 +0000

Elaine Langely, RN is in Haiti working at a clinic in Cayes Jacmel, a town of 30,000 on Haiti’s south coast. She and another nurse from New Orleans and a Haitian EMT are seeing 80 patients a day. There’s a serious shortage of medicines and medical supplies in the area. They’re seeing a lot of malnutrition, and high blood pressure and kids with stomach ailments. There’s no doctor so they’ve been consulting with Plenty Board Member, William Meeker, MD who works at a hospital in Nashville.