Green Power… !

"Ba ba lay bab lay bab ba lay o" native voices rose up in honor of mother earth and in resistance to the forces trying to destroy it, rose up into the sun-drenched June morning, pushing past 10 foot tall glistening corporate nylon flags and circling the park at City Hall. The corporate "flags" emblazoned with names of cities worldwide, from Africa to California, were placed at all four corners of San Francisco City Halls' grass plaza last week and were there in honor of World Environment Day, an international event called by the United Nations to bring attention to the very serious issue of our ever-increasingly polluted and abused planet.

The native singers were the Mohave Bird Singers from the Colorado River Indian Tribes and were part of a non-corporate, grassroots coalition of organizations from low-income communities of color across California gathered, across the street from City Hall, in honor of World Environment day and more importantly, Environmental Justice. Across the street, that is, because our corporate mayor (Newsom) refused to grant a permit for the rally. A mayor whose involvement in World Environment Day was sponsored by several corporations, one of which, PG&E, is one of the main perpetrators of deadly environmental racist tactics in poor communities all over the Bay Area, the same mayor whose own redevelopment plans for the Bayview are rife with environmental crimes.

"The (PG&E) power plant is in our back yard, whenever it releases fumes they go right in our house, All of our children are sick, they have nose-bleeds, and are on inhalers, my granddaughter is on two inhalers, one daily and one when she has a flare-up" Mother, grandmother and environmental racism survivor, Tessie Ester, who lives in Hunters View and deals with PG&E abuse daily addressed the crowd

Tessie was introduced by Marie Harrison, writer, activist and environmental justice organizer for GreenAction, who organized the rally to bring attention to the dirty secret of the environmental movement, environmental racism, which affects families like Tessies' all over Amerikka. Tessie, who brought her children and grandchildren to the rally, holding signs that shouted out the crimes against our community, our children, our people; EVERY YEAR THE PG&E HUNTERS POINT PLANT OPERATES IT SPEWS MORE THAN 600 TONS OF POLLUTION OVER THE AIR IN SAN FRANCISCO. Mrs. Ester closed out her powerful testimony with a chant to the crowd, "What do we want? - Clean air?… When do we want it? - NOW!!!"

After Tessie prepared the crowd of over a hundred folks for the battle for truth and justice Marie introduced one of many groups of powerful young folks who were present at the rally who are organizing in the Bayview and beyond on the crimes against our environment, "I've lived in the Bayview hunterspoint for most of my life and I am concerned about what is happening in our environment", Erica Andrews, from Literacy for Environmental Justice (LEJ) addressed the crowd, "…and I am here to see change, all the youth that we work with also want to see change, and considering the Bayview is about 80% youth that means a lot of people want to see change"

As Erica, a young African descendent woman spoke, I eyed the hoards of police, on foot, in cars and even worse, on horseback, present in the park, replete with so many barricades, that there were barricades on top of barricades, and of course, all the useless DPT "construction" and haphazard fencing around UN plaza, civic center BART, and in the green area where homeless people and immigrant elders like to rest their tired feet, also, like magic, disappeared for the week of World Environment Day.

Of course all that police presence came with the requisite, homeless clean-up. On my way into the park for the rally, I personally witnessed the "clean-up" effort, i.e., "You guys can't sit or stand in this park this week, or we'll have to issue you a loitering citation. (* and then, in a moment of real talk rare to the po'lice, the addition of, "the mayor is having a big event this week with mayors from all over the world so its better you left for awhile")

So how, I wondered, is it, that when the community really comes out to speak on the environment, or like Erica and Tessie and all of us just trying to breathe in our neighborhoods, does that present a threat to the "safety" of San Francisco's City Hall, but of course, that wasn't it, the corporate mayor was so worried that his PG&E sponsorship would be threatened by our truths, that he spent several thousand dollars on the po'lice just to get rid of us by any means necessary.

"I am gonna turn around to City Hall to speak to the individuals in suits, who spent the whole week showcasing our city as being a "green" environment, the next speaker was activist and Bayview fighter, Theresa Coleman, who turned the crowds attention toward the police state that was City Hall…"so now with fossil fuel in their paychecks, I would have expected them to give us the dignity to join us in this glorious moment…..We are about to make change, when the citizens have decided there will be no more fossil fuel, we will not pay PG&E no more, and they can take they plants and go elsewhere, put them in they back-yards…"

Theresa took a breath and looked back at our gathering, "Now speaking on behalf of Bayview Hunters Point, loaded with toxins, from the shipyards, but still our suits and their paychecks and their limos, sit in City Hall debating how they are going to spend their newly allocated money - but we are the humans and we are going to profit now!"
I laughed to myself as I heard Theresa, remembering my conversation with PG&E a few months ago, who refused to write-off an illegally charged bill to POOR Magazine, which when we ran out of most of our funding this year, and told them that there was no way we could afford to pay it, vowed. "to get from us somehow"

Mishwa Lee from The Campaign to shut down PG&E spoke next "First I want to talk about Homeland Security, real Homeland Security to me means that we have clean air and clean water, and our land is free of toxins," Mishwa went on to point out the real threat to our national security, " We have terrorists in our nation that are polluting our own land and our own water, so to create real Homeland security means standing up to that terrorist threat together and fighting back" She went on to outline an effort by her group to use baby clothes to send a message to the community, that there are children that are getting sick in Bayview Hunters Point and it must stop.

" We are here today to recognize what is going on in Bayview- Hunters Point but more importantly look at in the context of what is going on in the world community" the next speaker up was tireless fighter for the Bayview shipyard clean-up, scientist and environmental researcher Dr.Ahimsa Sumchai, who began by explaining the meaning of her beautiful name, which means non-injury in one of humanities' first recorded languages, "What's going on in the Bayview is also going on in cities all over the world, due to the phenomena of the burning of fossil fuels producing diseases called petro-chemical toxicity, i.e., diseases of the 21st century, it is also causing the melting of the ice-caps in the arctic, early run-offs in the snow in the state of California, and some of the weird diseases that we have seen in the last century.

She went on to outline the irony of the fact that following the mass genocide of people from the holocaust and Hiroshima Nagasaki, 60 years ago, people from all over the world came to San Francisco to sign a historic peace agreement, the first of its kind which birthed the United Nations, she then read a small passage from the universal declaration of human rights; "It is essential that human rights should be protected by human law…
For this man (Newsom) to tell us that we can not stand on the steps of City Hall to protest environmental justice on World Environment Day is the ultimate in hypocracy, and do you know why that man doesn't want you to stand here - because he got $100,000 dollars from PG&E. and the mayoral keynote address for world environment day on
June 1st was held at 77 Beale street- the headquarters of PG&E" She went on to outline the fact that Newsom is also trying to break ground on a federal superfund site ( also in the Bayview) filled with arsenic, lead and asbestos in the soil.
Ahimsa concluded with a call to action, reminding us that if we didn't stem the current tend towards destruction, it would mean the end of our planet "In 1966 Stokely Carmichael, leader of the SNCC jettisoned the American civil rights movement forward with two words, Black Power and 40 years later, we are standing here in the setting of the birth of the urban environmental justice movement; and so I believe that with the utterance of two words; Green Power, we have the power individually and collectively to turn this around."

The powerful day was reflective of our diverse neighborhoods and communities in California; cross-cultural, cross-generational, working-class and very low-income, where we all try to survive and thrive, even in the face of powerful corporate power structures like PG&E and Lennar development Corporation (who aims to build on the flagrantly unsafe land in the shipyard that Ahimsa spoke of.) The next speakers included fierce organizers from PODER, including, Jendry Ramos, a young Latina woman (17) who reminded all of us of our power as a unified community.

The Chinese Progressive Association represented next, and described the environmental hazards of being a very low-income immigrant who has to endure extremely unsafe living conditions due to the lack of affordable housing and living wage jobs available to them. As she spoke I was reminded of the ever increasing divide in Amerikka between low and no-wage workers and the very rich, a position of economic apartheid that is fostered locally and globally by multi-national corporations like the ones who have forced San Francisco's' hotel workers into an ongoing strike. Or even further down the worker food chain into prison labor and workfare workers forced to work with dangerous chemicals in prisons across the nation, and finally, the houseless folks in the City whose environments' (i.e., The Tenderloin) are filled with dangerous chemicals daily through Newsoms Power washing program, citation issuing, homeless people harassment program called Care Not Cash

"PG&E are killers, they need to be shut down!," Lula Bishop, from the Midway Residents for Environmental Justice told the terrible story of Midway Village, which was built in 1970 on land heavily contaminated with toxic chemicals from a neighboring PG&E site. Midway is a housing complex run by the San Mateo Housing Authority located in Daly City, between the Cow Palace and Highway 101, adjacent to the Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) site.. The 150 Midway units are occupied by 1200 people, primarily people of color and are contaminated with toxic substances, notably polynuclear aromatic hydrocarbons (PNAs), a class of compounds of which many are known carcinogens. Many families have died or become very sick behind the toxic conditions of Midway. There was a seriously botched and inadequate "clean-up" attempt led in 2001 by the State Department of Substance Control which declared the land safe until Green Action got involved to help the residents fight back.

"They (PG&E) left Midway village in utter ruins, many people have died and many more have become very sick, when we invited Kevin Shelly to our community to help us, he literally talked down to us, yelled at us and told us that PG&E was too big and too powerful to fight, but I believe in Karma, and you know what happened to Kevin Shelly now!" Lula went on to caution the crowd about PG&E's future plans to destroy more land and resources in their never ending search for fossil fuel.

The rest of the day was filled with more scholars from indigenous communities resisting Environmental destruction all over the state, as well as dancers and inspiring music to call out all of our collective strength to fight all the powers that continue to try to destroy the planet and its people. As I walked away from the rally, into the early afternoon sun, my eyes rested on the expanse of grass below me and as far as my eyes could see, green grass, reminded, like Ahimsa told us of our ability as citizen's of the earth, to fight back, with Green Power!

For more journalism on issues of poverty and racism by the people who experience it first-hand go on-line to http://www.poormagazine.org