The Ohio River is the most polluted river in the United States. In this series of essays entitled ‘ The Ohio River Speaks,‘ Will Falk travels the length of the river and tells her story. Read the first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh part of Will’s journey.

The Wind That Shakes The Goose Wings

By Will Falk / The Ohio River Speaks

“‘Twas hard the woeful words to frame, To break the ties that bound us, ‘Twas harder still to bear the shame, Of foreign chains around us…”

This Wild Mind Intensive program is offered by the Animas Valley Institute to Deep Green Resistance organizers, allies, and supporters. It will be held near Portland, Oregon in the United States.

“Wild Mind” Intensive for Activists & Revolutionaries

Those who confront oppression and destruction often struggle with profound stress and disconnection. This intensive aims to help you access deeper wellsprings of strength through connection to wild mind. Imagine what it would be like if nature and dreams were your primary guides.

In this article Elizabeth Claire Alberts describes Charles Moore’s discovery of microplastics throughout the ocean, freshwater rivers and lakes, and even in mist and rain.

‘Our life is plasticized’: New research shows microplastics in our food, water, air

by Elizabeth Claire Alberts / Mongabay

• Microplastics, plastic pieces smaller than 5 millimeters, have become increasingly prevalent in the natural world, and a suite of studies published in the last three years, including several from 2020, shows that they’ve contaminated not only the ocean and pristine wildernesses, but the air, our food, and even our bodies.
• Past research has indicated that 5.25 trillion plastic pieces are floating in the ocean, but a new study says that there are 2.5 to 10 times more microplastics in the ocean than previously thought, while another recent study found that microplastic “hotspots” could hold 1.9 million pieces per square meter.
• Other emerging research suggests that 136,000 tons of microplastics in the ocean are being ejected into the atmosphere each year, and blowing back onto land with the sea breeze, posing a risk to human health.
• Microplastics are also present in drinking water, and edible fruits and vegetables, according to new research, which means that humans are ingesting microplastics every day.

In 1997, Charles Moore was sailing a catamaran from Hawaii to California when he and his crew got stuck in windless waters in the North Pacific Ocean. As they motored along, searching for a breeze to fill their sails, Moore noticed that the ocean was speckled with “ odd bits and flakes,” as he describes it in his book, Plastic Ocean. It was plastic: drinking bottles, fishing nets, and countless pieces of broken-down objects.

The CoViD-19 pandemic is impacting Indigenous peoples across the Americas who are already living under ongoing colonization, have poor access to health care, and suffer disproportionately from pre-existing conditions that compromise the immune system.

by Laura Hobson Herlihy and Daniel Bagheri Sarvestani / Intercontinental Cry

Coronavirus now has spread throughout the Indigenous Americas. The Navajo nation reported over 1,600 cases of COVID-19 and 59 deaths on the largest US reservation, which expands through Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah. Nineteen members of the Afro-indigenous Garifuna people living in New York City have died. The Garifuna are migrants from the Caribbean coast of Central America, hailing from Belize, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua.

Trinity La Fey writes of sharing walls with abusers, of poverty and work, of finding radical feminism, and of navigating relationships in the midst of a patriarchal society.

By Trinity La Fey

Background is always tedious; I’ll try not to bore.  Poverty, racism and sexism were not things I gradually discovered.  I spent early years with a ranch-based family, that I had no idea I wasn’t related to, that called me their n!&*$r baby when I reflexively braided my hair into manageable bits.  We were all pale as the moon, all American mixed.  Their racism confused me because I knew that we were not 100% whatever white was.  Children get it.  Coming from ranch families that had the grandmother trauma of the depression made the family frugal to the point of neglect.  The single man coming from this environment who was responsible for the lives of my brother and I was destitute.  There was no one to mitigate his desperate rage and isolation, or inherited, old-timey sexism.  We had the lot of landing with a genuine psychopath, but those circumstances would have pushed even the most outstanding person.  Because the level of violence and impunity was so extreme, however, there was just no getting out of it (sane or otherwise) without putting a few things together, both about how social power works and the difference between self-discipline, or self-control and say, punishment or manipulation.

This article introduces a basic guide of generally accepted “security codes” for movements which can be applied in a variety of direct action, protest, and event situations. More articles related to security can be accessed here. These include topics like physical security for events, operational security, geolocation and tracking and many more.

By Max Wilbert

Activists and revolutionaries will often find themselves in situations that are dangerous for a variety of reasons. Whether we are engaged in protest, events, or direct actions, we need to protect our community, our mission, and ourselves. That is why we endeavor to teach security training to everyone in our community.

Siberian heat drives Arctic ice extent to record low for early July

by Gloria Dickie / Mongabay

• On June 17, 2020, a Siberian town registered a temperature of 100 degrees Fahrenheit, the highest ever recorded above the Arctic Circle. High temps across the region are driving impacts of great concern to scientists, firefighters, and those who maintain vulnerable Arctic infrastructure, including pipelines, roads, and buildings.
• The Siberian heat flowed over the adjacent Arctic Ocean where it triggered record early sea ice melt in the Laptev Sea, and record low Arctic sea ice extent for this time of year. While 2020 is well positioned to set a new low extent record over 2012, variations in summer weather could change that.
• The heat has also triggered wildfires in Siberia, releasing 59 million metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere in June and drying out the region’s tundra. Some blazes are known as “ zombie fires” possibly having smoldered underground all winter between 2019 and 2020.
• Also at risk from the rapid rise in warmth is civil and military infrastructure, built atop thawing permafrost. As Siberia heated up this year, a fuel tank at a Russian power plant collapsed, leaking 21,000 tons of diesel into the Ambarnaya and Dadylkan rivers, a major Arctic disaster. Worse could come as the world continues warming.

The record-setting heat wave that swept through Arctic Siberia in June has yielded a wide-range of deleterious effects in the expansive polar and sub-polar region, triggering raging wildfires, thawing permafrost, and now, spurring the rapid melt-out of Arctic sea ice.

Deforestation rate climbs higher as Amazon moves into the burning season

by Rhett Butler / Mongabay.com

10 July 2020

• Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon climbed higher for the fifteenth straight month, reaching levels not seen since the mid-2000s, according to data released today by Brazil’s national space research institute INPE.
• INPE’s satellite-based deforestation alert system detected 1,034 square kilometers of forest clearing during June 2020 bringing the twelve-month total to 9,564 sq km, 89% higher than a year ago.
• The extent of deforestation over the past year is the highest on record since INPE started releasing monthly numbers in 2007.
• The 12-month deforestation rate has risen 96% since President Jair Bolsonaro took office in January 2019.

Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon climbed higher for the fifteenth straight month, reaching levels not seen since the mid-2000s, according to data released today by Brazil’s national space research institute INPE. The news comes as the region moves into the dry season, when deforestation and forest fires typically accelerate.

Radical feminism has for decades contained a tension between separatism—the idea that women can and should organize separately from men—and men’s involvement in the political process. As Susan Hawthorne writes in her 2019 book In Defense of Separatism :

When a political group wants to strategise so that its members can arrive at agreed-on political tactics and ideas, they call for, and create, separate spaces. These might be in coffee shops, in community centres, in one another’s homes or in semi-public spaces such as workers clubs, even cinemas. When the proletariat was rebelling, they did not ask the capitalists and aristocracy to join them (even if a few did); when the civil rights movement started it was not thanks to the ideas and politics of white people (even though some whites joined to support the cause); when the women’s liberation movement sprang into life, it was women joining together to fight against their oppression.

Editor’s note: As industrial civilization devours the natural resources of the Planet, it leaves destruction in its wake. Since this system always depletes the land rather than operating on sustainable yield, it necessitates imperialism of new lands. This piece examines a new frontier in the war being waged against the planet: deep sea mining.

Deep Sea Mining Threatens More Than The Seafloor

Climate and Capitalism / July 10, 2020

A previous Climate & Capitalism article, Capitalism’s growing assault on the oceans, argued that the world is entering  “ a new phase in humanity’s relationship with the biosphere, where the ocean is not only crucial but is being fundamentally changed.” It cited research that described and graphed capital’s growing drive to industrialize the oceans and sea beds — a process that some scientists have dubbed the Blue Acceleration.