“We must turn our backs on the existing power structure and do what the Abolitionists and the Suffragists did. They saw that the power to fix the problems lay within them. We, too, are going to use our power and our passion to create the world we want to live in. We are going to live by our ideals, and we’ll do it so long, and so hard, and so passionately that we’ll drag the existing power structure with us.”
Riki Ott: I am part of a national grassroots campaign called Move to Amend, which I cofounded through Ultimate Civics, a project of Earth Island Institute, back in 2009. Move to Amend rapidly became a national movement after the Citizens United decision where the Supreme Court ruled that corporate persons are entitled to free speech—meaning unlimited spending—to influence election campaigns. Move to Amend is about abolishing corporate personhood—the illegitimate notion that corporations are entitled to the same rights as living, breathing human beings.
Most of our environmental and social woes are rooted in corporate personhood. We’ve developed a mindset that allows us to be colonized, to believe we have to live the way we live. I’d like to talk about changing people’s minds, because people’s minds have to change before the culture can be changed, and before the Constitution can be amended.
First, some background. My activism started with the Exxon Valdez oil spill of March 24, 1989, which I could see from my plane as I flew over the area. I was so traumatized by this sight that when we went to Valdez to refuel the plane, I thought to myself, what can one person do to fix something like this? This realization popped into my head: “I know enough to make a difference. Do I care enough?” I flashed back to my childhood to remember how I got to this place, at this time, with this knowledge, and I felt like a little chess piece on a giant board with an invisible hand moving me around. I realized that the universe gives you a choice. When everything is revealed, you have a choice: step up or step back.
My father sued the state of Wisconsin to stop the use of DDT there. He prevailed in 1971, and the rest of the nation banned DDT in 1972. My dad was my hero, but I realized on March 24, 1989, that the real lesson from that experience was that when a problem lies at your feet, you just need the courage to step up. I realized that the Exxon Valdez oil spill was my DDT. Today’s youth have yet another DDT: climate crisis. We’ve gone from DDT to oil spills to climate chaos, and the place to begin solving these problems is inside ourselves. We have to reach inside and pull out our gifts and tackle what is at our feet.
When I first learned of the BP disaster of 2010, I knew what would happen. I had heard all of the lies before, I had seen the cover-up before, and, frankly, I didn’t want to go through it all again. But I decided I couldn’t hide, and I went down to the Gulf to see how I could help the people avoid the mistakes we made with the Exxon Valdez disaster—the biggest of which was believing Exxon when it said, “We will make you whole.” Silly us. We still have toxic oil buried on our beaches in Prince William Sound. I used to take high school students out to the oiled beaches. We’d dig a pit about a foot and a half down. The surrounding beach rock is so porous, and so filled with oil, that the oil would actually flow into the pit and rise back up to the surface. This is still the state of our beaches. Scientists say it is probably going to be fifty more years before the oil fully degrades or breaks down. They have no idea when the ecosystem will recover. When a beach undergoes this kind of devastation, what do you think happens to all of the animals that breed on that beach, feed and forage on that beach, rear their young on that beach? I went down to the Gulf to tell people they would need a Plan B.
I also wanted to help the sick BP workers. I’ve been dealing with sick, disabled, and dying Exxon Valdez workers for twenty-one years, and I wanted to see if that could be avoided in the Gulf. I arrived in Venice, Louisiana, on May 5, 2010, to give my first talk to the Louisiana Shrimp Association, and what did I hear? I heard that fishermen out on the in-situ burning teams were sick—they were having trouble breathing, they had bad headaches, and their throats and eyes were burning. I found that the exact same federal policies with the exact same exemptions and loopholes that failed to protect workers’ health and safety decades ago in Prince William Sound were still in place. Nothing had changed. BP was using outdated laws to reduce its liability for paying to take care of its workers. I’d never thought I’d say that Exxon Valdez was a cakewalk, but it was compared to what happened in the Gulf.
Hurricane Creekkeeper John Wathen managed to get the only footage of what I came to call the “death gyres,” the rip currents that collected dead animals offshore. The Incident Command—BP and the U.S. Coast Guard—kept the media 1,500 feet up in the air so the press couldn’t really capture the situation there. The animal carcasses were corralled, taken out to sea, and dumped at night, according to fishermen who were involved with so-called “Night-time Operations.” Offshore workers reported “thousands of dolphins, birds too numerous to count, sea turtles too numerous to count,” and even whales in the death gyres. Keep in mind that you should add two zeros—one hundred times—to these numbers. I say that based on scientific studies of carcass drift in Alaska, where only 1 percent of the carcasses were actually recovered.
History repeated itself because BP used the same mechanical cleanup technology that didn’t work with Exxon Valdez: booms. Booms are erected to keep oil out of certain areas, but oil gets on the inside of the boom by jumping under or over it, and then the boom actually holds the oil close instead of keeping the oil away. In this way, unattended booms kept oil pinned inside of marshes and against barrier islands for hundreds of miles along the Gulf coast.
Then you have the tragedy of the civilians. In Alaska, we don’t have miles of populated beaches. In the Gulf there are about four to five million people living where the oil came ashore, and millions more visitors. The dispersant came ashore in the air, in the water, and in the rain. People got sick. I took pictures on beaches where, facing in one direction, I could see HAZMAT workers with their boots taped to their pants legs to avoid getting contaminated, while in the other direction children swam in areas with dispersant and oil. The HAZMAT workers had been told by BP’s safety trainers that the ocean was contaminated, and they were to stay fifteen feet away. But the public officials declared that the beach was open and the same ocean was safe to swim in.
I got a lot of phone calls from Gulf residents and visitors after they’d spent time at the beach, and they and their little children are sick now. The officials who said it was safe are downplaying that, of course. There were five federal agencies out there, and they couldn’t find anything toxic in the air or the water, but I had no problem documenting a large number of common symptoms across the Gulf, from Terrebonne Parish in Louisiana on the west side of Barataria Bay, all the way over to Apalachicola, Florida, in the crook of the panhandle. I saw the exact same symptoms that occurred with Exxon Valdez workers: dry coughs, headaches, sore throats, dizziness, nose bleeds, ear bleeds, eye problems, peeling hands, bad skin rashes. Not only were these symptoms common among workers on the Exxon Valdez oil spill, they also were common among people exposed to oil after the Prestige spill in Spain and the Hebei Spirit spill in South Korea, and among residents of Fort Chipewyan in Canada, which is downstream of the Alberta Tar Sands development. The symptoms have also occurred in communities close to fracking (hydraulic fracturing) activities in the Rocky Mountain states and in Pennsylvania.
Oil is toxic to life on the planet. This is being downplayed by our federal government and by the oil companies. I can’t exactly take a picture of a cough or a sore throat, but I know people who are on their fourth round of antibiotics, and their symptoms are not going away. Antibiotics are not making people better, because it’s not a biological problem; it’s a chemical one. The petrochemical industry rules down in Mississippi and Louisiana. The doctors do not challenge the petrochemical industry, so they do not diagnose chemical illnesses. People are being misdiagnosed and suffering in the short term, and they are not going to get better in the long term without proper treatment for chemical illnesses.
I traveled back and forth across the Gulf giving talks, encouraging people to start problem solving. If they didn’t like what they were hearing, if the government’s reality wasn’t matching their own, what was it that they wanted to do? I kept encouraging them to come up with the answers. I asked if they thought there was a problem with the air quality. Yes, they did. “What can we do?” they asked. “What do you want to do?” I asked. Well, can we take our own air quality samples? Can we take our own water quality samples? Yes. I told them about proper sampling methods and analytical labs. So people did that—they took samples and sent the samples off to labs. This happened in the Deep South, where people have a very colonized mindset; they are very acquiescent to authority.
Before I went to the Gulf, I had a conversation with George Lakoff in Berkeley. I was excited to tell him all about Move to Amend. He said, “Great idea. What are you doing to organize in the Deep South?” I said, “Nothing.” Lakoff ‘s point was that we cannot have a national movement without the Deep South, and his point was well taken. I would like to have a do-over of that conversation now that I’ve made the South a focus of my activism.
As I traveled back and forth across the Gulf states after the disaster, people showed me the results of their air quality samples and their water quality samples—and the levels of toxic chemicals were very high. People told me they were sick and asked how could they prove that they were sick because of what they were finding in the air and water. I told them that to prove that, we would need to take blood samples. I talked about the connection between the air we breathe, the water we drink or swim in, the food we eat, and what shows up in our blood. If we are living, breathing, and swimming in an oiled environment, or eating oiled food, the oil will show up in our blood. People got it. They started nonprofit organizations and raised $300 for each of the sickest people to pay for blood tests to find out if the oil was in their blood. Sure enough, the tests came back showing that people were in the upper ninety-fifth percentile, nationwide, for oil in their blood. People realized the oil was flowing straight from the Gulf Stream into their bloodstreams. I’m sure the test results delighted a ton of lawyers, but they terrified residents.
What’s the official story? The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and Centers for Disease Control (CDC) say that oil and dispersants are not toxic, because the same ingredients that are in dispersants are in Klondike ice cream bars, ibuprofen, household cleaning products, lip gloss, skin repair cosmetics, and more. NOAA and BP teamed up to visit eighth-grade classrooms in the Gulf to show children how to safely clean up an oil spill. They spilled cocoa powder in a little aquarium to mimic an oil spill—cocoa powder, right? Yummy. Then they sprinkled in Dawn dish soap to “disperse” the oil. “See, children? Dispersant works to clean up the oil, and we’re going to save the world. It’s okay.”
The saddest and scariest part of the BP disaster for me was the realization that our federal administration—the Obama administration, Mr. Hope—has no exit strategy to get America off oil or coal. It really is all up to us. In the Gulf, it didn’t take people twenty years like with the Exxon Valdez spill to realize the federal government was not in control of the situation; it took them two months. By mid-June after the April spill, people in the Gulf started to ask me, “What’s happening? Isn’t this America? Why is BP in charge?” I told them that our democracy has been hijacked by large corporations. I said this to fundamental Christians to the right of right, conservatives, tea party people, and oilmen. People from audience after audience came up after my talks to let me know that I had not said anything that offended them. I was asked to come back to the Gulf to give democracy trainings. They told me they didn’t care about BP’s money, but they cared about their culture. They wanted their community back. Always, they asked, “What can we do?” I kind of live for the “What can we do?” question.
We were given a structure of government with three branches. If one of the branches runs amok, there is a system of checks and balances to rebalance power. But if one branch really runs amok, it’s up to We the People to fix it. We are the ultimate check.
Our U.S. Supreme Court ran amok back in 1886, when it allowed corporations to have constitutional rights, which became known as corporate personhood. Humans are born with inalienable rights—rights that cannot be transferred or surrendered to nonhuman entities. In 1886, the Supreme Court decided that corporations were entitled to be treated equal to humans, and that this meant giving them constitutional protections, rights. From that erroneous and illegitimate decision, a body of law grew that became known as the doctrine of corporate constitutional rights. This facilitated the concentrated wealth and power that we see in corporations now, and it has enabled our own democratically enacted laws to be used against us. Thomas Jefferson predicted that the judiciary branch could destroy the democratic Republic he had helped create; he called the U.S. Supreme Court the “engine of consolidation.”
Move to Amend is building and coalescing a people’s movement to counter and correct the Supreme Court. Our goal is to amend the U.S. Constitution to affirm that only human beings have constitutional rights. We aim to abolish corporate personhood and to rewrite the illegitimate judicial creation that equates money with speech. How are we doing this? It is one thing to go to universities and have this very elite discussion about amending the Constitution, but how are we addressing this cause with the rest of America? We’re working from the ground up, and local communities are the primary actors.
People often ask who we are working with in Congress. Forget Congress for now. Congress is broken and the system is broken. Why would we expect a broken system to fix itself? We must turn our backs on the existing power structure and do what the Abolitionists and the Suffragists did. They saw that the power to fix the problems lay within them. We, too, are going to use our power and our passion to create the world we want to live in. We are going to live by our ideals, and we’ll do it so long, and so hard, and so passionately that we’ll drag the existing power structure with us. That is what we have to do.
I have spent 250 or more days per year on the road for the last three years giving a talk called “Protecting What We Love” to students ranging from fifth grade to university age. I tell them we have to figure out what we love first, and then we can build our world—which includes an economy—in a way that protects what we love. Right now our economy is structured to prioritize making money at all costs, which works if you don’t have to breathe the air or drink the water. What we need to do is build an economy that sustains and nourishes environmental wealth first. We must account for social wealth, and factor in our relationships with each other, our health, and quality time with our children. Finally, we must either build jobs that create community well-being, or create a jobless culture, like subsistence cultures in Alaska, where the economy is based on bartering, cooperative living, and trading. Who said we had to work for money? You can’t eat it or drink it. We need to think outside of the box and talk about regenerative communities.
Universities teach triple bottom-line accounting, which is about building one or more forms of wealth without decreasing the others. Communities talk about living economies, which is also about measuring, creating, and balancing all forms of wealth. It’s time to put these ideas into practice by changing minds and changing culture. We need to shake things up and have our voices heard loudly and often. We need to protest what we’re opposed to and rally for what we’re trying to create.
My personal form of protest is my work educating people about chemical illnesses and treatment in the Gulf. The petrochemical industry has managed to capture and reframe the chemical illnesses in the Gulf as “colds and flu,” telling people to take a Tylenol when their bodies are trying to fight chemical poisoning. People are confused about why their headaches or skin rashes or respiratory problems won’t go away. The symptoms for chemical illnesses mimic many common symptoms. I’m working with communities to start an epidemiology study across the Gulf, because we can’t trust the federal government. I’m working to build a democracy movement in the Deep South. This is about us, We the People, taking back the power and writing our own energy legislation without the fossil fuel industry and the nuclear power industry. We have the power to make this change.
Derrick: In all of the talks that I do around the country, I ask people if they believe we live in a democracy. I ask, “Do you believe that governments take better care of human beings than corporations?” Out of thousands and thousands of people, never has a single person said yes. That’s an extraordinary state of affairs. It’s extraordinary for us to accept this and at the same time be capable of saying that we live in the greatest democracy in the world. It’s utterly insane.
I have seen one example of participatory democracy in action that I love to tell about. I live in far northern California. When you think of far northern California, what is the first plant that comes to mind? The county of Del Norte attempted to reduce the number of marijuana plants that a person can grow for medicinal, personal use. You were allowed to have ninety-nine plants, and some people thought that was excessive. The County Board of Supervisors attempted to reduce the number to six, and I have never in my life heard of such an angry crowd as at this meeting. The Supervisors weren’t able to implement this plan. Whenever I get too discouraged—which is quite often—I think about this example of participatory democracy actually working. The Board of Supervisors wouldn’t have made it out of the room had they changed it.
Riki: I can add more examples to that. I have been traveling a lot, and I feel like a thread in a crazy quilt—the thread that seams all of these stories together. I’ve actually gotten more hopeful, being on the road, rather than less hopeful. I have found there are fifth graders who can knowledgably talk about waste biofuels. They know the difference between biofuels and waste biofuels; they know about tidal power and solar power. One fifth grader even explained biomimicry. I’ve seen communities that are involved in transition towns and intentional living with five, six, or ten families who share chores and skills. I’ve given my talk in thirty-three states, and I’ve seen that many people are worried about the collapse of industrialized society. I say bring it on—the sooner the better. I see already what’s coming up to replace the old society. When a forest burns, does that mean the forest is gone forever? No, new shoots come up. I’ve met pockets of people who know this in different states around the U.S. and in other countries. There are enough pockets, I think, to pull us all through.
Another example of participatory democracy was the Great Duck-In in Barrow, Alaska. The Migratory Bird Act had been amended so there was to be no spring duck hunting. The Native people in Barrow, which is the northernmost town in America, are locked in ice in spring, when the rest of the birds migrate through the lower forty-eight states. The ducks are their first fresh food after winter. They said the amendment wasn’t going to work for them, and they went on hunting. The Fish and Wildlife enforcement came into town and arrested a man who had harvested some ducks. The next day, the entire village of Barrow showed up at the hotel where the Fish and Wildlife representative was staying, each individual with as many ducks as they could hold in their hands; every man, woman, and child. The Fish and Wildlife representative climbed out a back window and was never seen again. That collective act of civil disobedience changed the federal law.
This type of unified action is what needed to happen in the Gulf when, for example, the community of Gulf Shores, Alabama, adopted a policy to suppress film crews on the beaches. The city didn’t want the film crews to film the oil, as it would hurt tourism. They made a law that film crews had to get permission to film by buying a license for $255 that allowed them to film thirty days in the future, but not immediately. That really put a chill on documentary film crews. If only four hundred documentary film crews had descended on Gulf Shores the day after the law passed and gotten arrested, perhaps the law would have changed. If one person gets arrested, it’s not a newsworthy event. We need to think in terms of masses for protesting and resistance.
Derrick: The head of security—such a nice euphemism—during apartheid South Africa said that the thing they were most afraid of from the African National Congress was not sabotage or even violence, but that they would get a mass of South Africans to stop respecting law and order. He said that no security force in the world can withstand a populace that no longer believes in the legitimacy of law and order as such.
Riki: Yes, and whose law is it? In our country, corporations are driving more and more laws through the Supreme Court for their selfpreservation and the protection of their bottom line. I tell fifth graders that sometimes laws are morally wrong, and that makes a law broken; “illegitimate” is too big a word for fifth grade. I remind them that the law once held that black people couldn’t vote. Isn’t that a bad law to think of now? The little kids say, “Yes, that’s bad.” Another broken law was the one that prevented women from voting. What did black people and women have to do to fix these broken laws? They had to break them to fix them. After hearing this, one little twelve-year-old girl said she couldn’t wait until her first arrest. I have not been kicked out of a school yet for teaching this. Civil disobedience is one of the tools in our toolkit that we were given to hold our democracy, such as it is, in check. Let’s pick it up and use it.
There are power point presentations on my website, www. ultimatecivics.org, where you can learn more about the evolution of corporate personhood and the demise of democracy. I’m primarily focused on getting off oil, but I realize we can’t end our dependency on coal and fossil fuels as long as the oil industry is writing the laws of the land. It’s circular. We need to take back the power of the pen, and that means we need to shake things up—the sooner, the better.
Derrick: I gave a talk in New Mexico a few years ago. It was part of a benefit for an organization that was attempting to keep yet another toxic dump site out of yet another poor community of color. The people in the audience commented that many of the police were actually their neighbors, but still they enforced the laws that were passed by those in distant places to assert the rights of distant corporations over their community. We started to brainstorm about how fun it would be if the police actually enforced local communal standards. We all laughed at that fantasy. Then we talked about what it might be like if we in our communities decided to put together local police forces that would enforce cancer-free zones or oil spill–free zones or rape-free zones, for that matter. Communal enforcement of communal, social norms is an important part of the solution here. We have to decide what we love and then we have to defend it.
Riki: The demise of our democracy has been going on in phases. Gangs of America is a great book by Ted Nace that tells what has happened in America in the form of a story. The crux of Nace’s story is that there have been three critical phases. The first phase started after we fought a revolution against the British monarchy and its money. For the first one hundred or so years after the Revolutionary War, people held very tight reins over corporations, controlling them carefully through the state legislatures. Corporations were given privileges, not rights. During the next hundred years, phase two, corporations hammered at the legislative doors, demanding more and more privileges and power. This situation evolved, gradually, into state legislatures handing out rights to corporations. We’re in the third phase now, where corporations are not even bothering with state law and federal law. They are just writing transnational trade agreements that undermine democratically enacted state and federal laws. Talk about the power getting removed from the people.
Derrick, your mention of cancer-free zones and corporate laws reminds me of another Gulf story. Under federal law oil waste is considered hazardous waste. After the BP disaster in the Gulf, the waste started accumulating too quickly, and there were not enough hazardous waste sites to dispose of it. So the oil waste was declassified from its status as hazardous waste, and now that oil waste is finding its way into local municipal dumps. Of course, the poor communities were targeted first for waste disposal sites, because the richer communities said, “not in our backyard.”
What will happen next, I’m betting based on the Exxon Valdez experience, is the great scientific controversy to confuse the public about the extent of the damages. There were two bodies of science that came out of the Exxon Valdez oil spill. The non-industry-funded scientists said there was a problem and damage from the oil, and that the recovery of the ecosystem was delayed because of the oil. The industry-funded scientists said everything was happy and fine.
Those two bodies of science were made public in 1993 in completely separate forums. I went to both. At the Exxon-funded forum in Atlanta, Georgia, police officers ringed the rooms because, as they said, they were “expecting trouble from Alaska.” There were six of us Alaskans who went down for this. The police were worried and expecting trouble from me, Riki Ott. The mayor of Cordova said, “The only thing Riki Ott will shoot off is her mouth.” The upshot of the conference was that the police realized they were on the wrong side. To bring this much longer story to a close, at the end, when the six of us were standing around saying goodbye to each other, the police, who had by now befriended us, came and ringed us once more. They were not threatening us, but listening to us say goodbye to each other. I heard one of them behind me say to another, “I have never seen such a large corporation afraid of such a small group of people.” When the people unite and speak with one voice, we are unstoppable.
After the Santa Barbara oil spill in 1969, twenty million people in the nation rose up and said we would not accept as “normal” corporations poisoning our oceans, rivers, air, and land for their profit. People wanted more environmental protection, and law after law got passed to protect the environment and public health. Nixon even created the Environmental Protection Agency—which has since been captured, but never mind that.
That level of public outrage and solidarity cannot be tolerated by corporate America. That is why there was and still is such a stomping down of imagery from the Gulf to control the story of damages. There are a lot of sick people in the Gulf, and their story is not going away. It might be suffocated for political reasons, but that story is going to pop out again, because there are too many people in the Gulf who saw what was really going on. I am hopeful that what happened in the Gulf can become the turning point in our national transition to a saner energy future, but it’s going to take all of us in America knowing what is going on in the Gulf. Together, we must say: it’s time for an energy transition, period.
Postscript: In March 2012, BP and the plaintiffs’ committee announced an economic settlement and a medical settlement. The medical settlement contains hundreds of millions of dollars for medical claims, medical monitoring, and medical services including five community health care clinics across the Gulf, staffed with doctors trained to treat chemical illnesses.
This is the first time human health impacts have been recognized in an oil spill. Even though the medical settlement looks good on paper, it contains many, many details that could easily limit BP’s liability as to how much the corporation will have to pay injured people. In addition to limiting its medical liability, BP is claiming that wildlife in the Gulf is thriving and more abundant since the disaster. Exxon claimed this as well, the year following the spill. Wildlife in Prince William Sound still has not recovered; the herring fisheries are closed indefinitely until stocks recover. I expect this story of long-term harm to repeat in the Gulf.
Riki Ott, June 11, 2012