[Occupymendocino] A cautionary tale of a Placewith hard ecologicallimits.

[agnes at mcn.org]

Dear Friends of Occupy Mendocino,

In Naomi Klein's new book :This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the
Climate she reminds us that Al Gore called Climate Change an "inconvenient
truth" as an inescapable fact we prefer to ignore.

In the chapter called Beyond Extraction there is a story about a small
island in the South pacific just 21 square Kilometers, called Nauru.

the Australian government was proud of its protectorate of 10,000 people
in 1985. Then an A.P. article said that Nauru had the highest per capita
gross national product-even higher than the Persian gulf Sheikdoms.
Everyone in Nauru had free health care,housing and education.

All the wealth was derived from an odd geological factor. For  thousands
of years the island was nothing but a cluster of coral reefs protruding
from the waves.Nauru became the pit stop for migrating birds who dropped
by to feast on shell fish and mollusks.Gradually the bird poop  built up
between the coral spires forming a hard rocky land mass. the rock was
eventually covered over with topsoil and dense forests. This created a
tropical oasis
of coconut palms, tranquil beaches and thatched huts. Nauruans lived on
fish and black noddy birds. Visitors called it Pleasant Isle.

That began to change after a colonial officer picked up a rock that was
later found to be mostly phosphate of lime- a valuable agricultural
fertilizer. foreign companies began mining phosphate and Nauru began
developing at super speeds. The catch was Nauru was simultaneously
commiting suicide.

In the 1960s the island looked pleasant enough from the sea, but it was an
illusion. Behind the narrow fringe of coconut palms circling the island
was an interior ravaged of forest and topsoil. Nauruans could not grow
their own food. the phosphate had been mined down to the bones. All you
could see  was a forest of ghostly coral totems.

What happened to the people? They had  imported processed food and suffered
an epidemic of diseases, diabetes and early death.
The australian government offered a permanent home to the Nauruans.
In effect Nauru was developed to disappear- designed by the Australian
government and extractive companies who controlled her fate ---as a
disposable country.

In 1968  the now independent government of Nauru invested their mining
profits in Hawaiian and Australian real estate while winding down
phosphate mining. The plan to rebuild the island failed.  Nauru now
desperate for foreign cash pursued some shady get-rich-schemes.

In the 1990s,during a  period of financial deregulation- the island became
the prime money laundering  haven where banks paid no taxes, were free
from oversight and regulation.  according to the 2000 NY Times magazine
Nauru was featured as Public Enemy No. 1 of all the money laundering sites
whose total value had ballooned to a $5 Trillion Shadow economy.In total
they were home to 400 Phantom Banks.

However, these schemes caught up with Nauru. It faces not only ecological
bancrupcy but with an $800 Million debt Nauru faces financial bancrupcy.
I quote Naomi Klein here "The island nation is highly vulnerable to a
crisis it had no part in creating.Climate Change- the drought, ocean
acidification and rising water  it brings. Speaking at the 1997 United
nations Climate Conference that adopted the Kyoto protocols- the then
President of Nauru described the collective claustrophobia that gripped
the country.
      "We are trapped, a wasteland at our back and to our front a
terrifying, rising flood of biblical proportions."

Klein says "Few places on earth embody the suicidal results of building
our economies on polluting extraction more graphically than Nauru. "Thanks
to the mining of phosphates Nauru has spent the last century  disappearing
from the inside out.Now thanks to our collective mining of fossil fuels it
is disappearing from the outside in." In 2011the then-President of Nauru
wrote in the NY Times Mag.Marcus Stephens wrote that Nauru provides a
cautionary tale about life in a place with ecological limits."

What can we do to face the extractive economy of oil and gas?

What can we do to slow down the warming below 2 degrees celcius within the
next ten years?
Speak out to keep carbon in the ground and in the forests. Help stop the
Keystone XL Pipeline- a bill will be introduced in the next few days by
the Republican Congress of Climate change deniers. We may have to block
the tar sands pipeline and support Canadian Indian Treaty Rights to save
the earth.

Canadian Neil Young's Supported "Native Treaty Rights Concert" raised
$600,000 for a  fight in the courts to defend Treaties of unceeded lands
where tar sands oil in Alberta would release massive amounts of heat
trapping methane gas is our legal defense to keep carbon in the ground.
Speak out, civil disobedience is required to stop the mad rush to
ecological suicide.