Some Evenings are Unforgettable, or: Property is not Land--and Land is what Matters.

On the way to Chihuahua, Mexico, 10.15. Photo, Wendy Lynne Lee

There are some evenings--some days too--that are simply unforgettable. Saturday, October 3rd, 2015 was one of these. 

First, Friday, October 2nd: I recognized my fine friend and ally, David--even tough we'd never met in person--when he pulled up in front of the El Paso, Texas Airport in a well-utilized truck with Mexican plates. The flight had been arranged fairly hastily, and I was already counting the hours before my class the following Monday afternoon at 5PM.

But all of this--the flight, the class, the country--soon gave way to that delightful and all too rare gift called conversation, the kind we have with old friends, even the ones whose faces are new to us. Wending our way through the gorgeous spareness of Chihuahua, Mexico's  highland desert is bounded by the endless Sierra Madre, and is one of the most biologically diverse desert eco-regions on the planet (http://www.worldwildlife.org/ecoregions/na1303). 

It's also among the most endangered by a host of industries flying the flags of NAFTA's free trade beneficiaries--and most recently by Pemex (Petroleos Mexicanos) whose intention is to begin fracking despite what are now well-established hazards to the ecologies, the habitats, the communities and the peoples whose voices they routinely ignore. 

With an estimated 600 Trillion cubic feet of "recoverable" shale gas, the only wonder is why we haven't seen more gas rigs already (https://ejatlas.org/conflict/resistance-to-fracking-in-chihuahua-mexico).

But this is because Pemex and its corporate colleagues are going to have a real fight on their hands.

In Veracruz they already do.

Crossing the border into Mexico, David and I were on our way to the city Chihuahua, Chihuahua for the Foro Binacional: En defensa del desierto y el agua. No al fracking, where I was scheduled to speak to an audience of activists, insurgents, organizers, indigenous people all gathered to discuss, strategize, share ideas, and work out conflicts in the interest--I soon came to understand--no so much of protecting property, but of defending land.

Property--that is a thing owned whose value can be commodified as the price paid to transform it into the primary instrument of capital; it is the space of exchange and labor, a site for the creation of wealth and the disposal of waste. 

Land--that is the soil which makes possible the place, the life, the ancestral sensibilities, the culture of long-rooted human and nonhuman communities whose own ebb and flow reflect the living ecologies to which they pay tribute.

Photo, Chihuahua, Wendy Lynne Lee, 10.15.

Property is not land, and land is not property. 

Yet it's "property" that continues to dominate the discourse of too many American anti-fracking activists who, even when they advocate for environmental protections for state parks seem to think more in the horse-trading terms of one mile set-backs, negotiated subsurface agreements, and the salvage of wood lots surrounded by well pads, than in terms of the organic, the historical, the aesthetic, or the experienced.  

We seem to think only in terms of surfaces, parcels, and right of ways-- when there is far more to be said about ways of life whose peoples know the earth by its very texture and smell.

I don't know--would not pretend to know--what might have been on the mind of one young indigenous woman who smiled at me from across what seemed centuries of culture and tradition at the Foro Nacional. Unmistakable, however, was her pondering sober gaze from behind a scarf whose bright colors bespoke a world as old as it was rich and living, a world of land.

Photo, Wendy Lynne Lee

Still, I knew her to have travelled a long ways with her husband and baby because she understood intimately--no doubt in her very blood--the threat Pemex and its multinational analogues pose to her rootedness of place in the world of her family, her plants, her animals, her life. 

By the time I had finished what offering I had to make to Foro Nacional, by the time I had struggled through countless conversations outside an auditorium alive with strategy, planning, and new ideas, I had come to realize that Socrates really was right when he asks us in The Apology for what we're willing to give up our lives.

None give up their lives for mere property.

We give up our lives for land.

So, when an evening riotous with dancing and loud music and revelry and good beer and laughter and hugging and hope--all in language I cannot speak, but understood just as well in that beautiful Mexican night--finally drew to a close...when the morning came and my friend David made sure I was safely on a gray bus through a gray city on a gray road...I knew that I had learned something.

And that I would keep it.

***********************************************************
   

What follows is a presentation I am very honored to be able to give October 3rd, In Chihuahua, Mexico, at the Foro binacional: 

“En defensa del desierto y el agua. No al fracking." 

The conference description is as follows:

"Chihuahua vs fracking, la Alianza Mexicana contra el Fracking y la Fundación Heinrich Böll convocan al foro donde especialistas, organizaciones y comunidades afectadas por la fractura hidráulica o fracking y por gasoductos informarán con datos científicos y experiencias sobre las consecuencias que esta práctica conlleva."

The paper itself, part personal reflection from the Pennsylvania shalefields, part factual survey of immediate destruction and likely future impacts, and part analysis of continuing fossil fuel extraction in light of climate change, stems from my current book project: "Eco-Nihilism: The Philosophical Geopolitics of the Climate Change Apocalypse," available, I hope in later 2016, Lexington Press.

From Activism to Insurgency:

Civil Disobedience is an Act of Self-Defense

Wendy Lynne Lee

Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania

Presentation and Photographs: https://www.flickr.com/photos/wendylynnelee/albums/72157659193602785

https://www.academia.edu/16323726/From_Activism_to_Insurgency_Civil_Disobedience_is_an_Act_of_Self-Defense

I remember a time when I’d take my daughter, Carley, on meandering Sunday morning drives through the thousands shades of green that color the hills and valleys, the farms and forests of rural Pennsylvania. I’d grown up in the Southwest United States amidst riotous transformations from desert pinks to shimmering grasslands to the indigo of the Rockies at night, but I’d also grown to love the explosions of rust-red, Marigold-yellow, and pumpkin, the incredible show that Autumn in the Northeast U.S. puts on every year. Even though the Granite of the Colorado Rockies had to make way for ancient Appalachian Basin shale beds, geology has long signified something permanent, historical, and all-but-immutable for me; it had been a source of both wonder and consolation—at least until the drill rigs, sand cans, waste water tankers, armies of roust-abouts, engineers, and project managers showed up in their shiny white trucks with their Texas and Oklahoma plates.

It’s hard to exaggerate the extent to which Pennsylvanians were caught off guard by the invasion of gas companies like Cabot, Chesapeake, XTO, Range Resources, or “Wildcatters” with catchy names like Inflection or Penneco. It felt like a military offensive; only instead of tanks and armored personnel carriers, we watched tractor-trailers carrying gigantic drill bits, immense engines and turbines, huge silica-conveyors, and literally thousands of white trucks with diamond plate boxes full of chemicals and explosives rambling down two lane country roads, ripping them up from stem to stern along the way to acres and acres of flattened mountain top—“pads” converted from forest and wildlife habitat into parking lots for the monstrous machinery of gas production.

The Marcellus drilling boom began in earnest in 2005—but was no doubt on the drawing boards of the big oil and gas companies years earlier spurred on by weak environmental regulations, a long history of resource liquidation, pollution, corporate abrogation of responsibility, and a culture of resignation to political turpitude and regulatory neglect.  The Marcellus is the fourth largest shale play in the U.S. as of 2012 (http://www.usasymposium.com/bakken/docs/Clover Global Solutions,LP - The Seven Major US Shale Plays.pdf), and is likely to move up that list once the hundreds of miles of new or upgraded transmission and gathering pipeline are completed along with compressor facilities and export depots. As reported by the Pipeline and Gas Journal as far back as 2011:

More than half of the interstate natural-gas pipeline projects proposed to federal energy regulators since early 2010 involve Pennsylvania — at a cost estimated at more than $2 billion, the Associated Press reported on Aug. 15. That means hundreds of new miles of transmission and gathering lines as part of the network that extends through Pennsylvania and neighboring states, as well as dozens of new or upgraded compression stations. (http://www.pipelineandgasjournal.com/pennsylvania-new-hub-pipeline-work)

It’s an easy thing to tell you what you already know—horizontal, slickwater hydraulic fracturing—fracking—is bad. According to Global Witness, environmental activists in Latin America and Southeast Asia in have taken the lead in bringing the public’s attention to the serious environmental, wildlife habitat destruction, and human health issues associated with what restoration ecologist Kevin Heatley has called “dispersed industrialization,” namely, an industrializing process unconfined to a particular location of manufacture, but instead dispersed throughout wide regions of extraction, processing, and transport. With at least forty documented cases of environmental activists murdered in Mexico from 2002-2012, and more than 908 worldwide, we all know how that the stakes are high. You know it; the oil and gas industry knows it; the politicians and policy-makers know it. Indeed, the only stakes higher than the prospect of billions of petrodollars filling the pockets of some of the world’s most mercenary and ruthless corporations are the existential conditions of the planet itself.

What I want to make sure I impress on you, however, is that although the risks you’ve taken to expose this criminal enterprise are tremendous, they’re of equally tremendous value. Fact is, I wish I could get my own fellow Americans to take this crisis as seriously as you do, as did 448 murdered Brazilians, 109 Hondurans, and 67 Phillippines, among others.  The stakes really are that high. Defined narrowly, hydraulic fracturing

is the process of drilling down into the earth before a high-pressure water mixture is directed at the rock to release the gas inside. Water, sand and chemicals are injected into the rock at high pressure which allows the gas to flow out to the head of the well. The process is carried out vertically or, more commonly, by drilling horizontally to the rock layer. The process can create new pathways to release gas or can be used to extend existing channels. (http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-14432401).

 But that’s only a tiny sliver of the story. Fact is, once you account for the full scale of environmental, health and community cost you realize that “fracking” is just shorthand for a process of industrialization that—since 2005 and 500,000 active natural gas wells in the U.S. alone—is responsible for

·      The damage or destruction of at least 360,000 acres of land. 

·      The permanent contamination of at least 250 billion gallons of water. (enough water to supply 20,591,781 people for a year)

·      The injection of at least 2 billion gallons of chemicals, many of them carcinogens, deep into the ground. 

·      The emission of 450 tons of air pollution. 

·      The emission of at least 280 million gallons of wastewater, a substantial portion of it radioactive.  

·      4000 documented cases of contaminated ground water, and 100 million metric tons of carbon dioxide or methane emissions from completed wells.

The amounts vary widely, but anywhere from 2 to 16 million gallons of water per frack are necessary to the drilling process according to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). In Pennsylvania’s Marcellus shale play, the typical number of gallons is 4.5 million/ (http://www.usgs.gov/faq/categories/10132/3824), requiring 400 tanker trucks, often idling, emitting diesel fumes (http://www.dangersoffracking.com/). According to one university study,

[t]he large fleets of diesel trucks…required to support the fracking process significantly increase ground level ozone and particulate matter as well as the risk of traffic accidents. Ground level ozone is a potent pulmonary irritant responsible for reduced pulmonary function and the exacerbation of asthma and emphysema.  Elevations in particulate matter are responsible for an increased incidence of asthma, cardiovascular disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and cancer. (http://emba.villanova.edu/content/dam/villanova/sustainability/McD-LFrackingEnvironmentHealth.pdf).

Eack frack on average requires 40,000 gallons of chemicals to “stimulate” the well. These include benzene, lead, uranium, mercury, hydrochloric acid, formaldehyde, ethylene glycol, among a host of other carcinogens, toxins, and neurotoxins.

Methane—a potent greenhouse gas—leaches from the fissures produced by chemically induced explosions intended to release the gas. As of 2013 there were over 1000 documented cases of drinking well water contamination in the U.S. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that this is a dangerous business, especially when you consider that a well can be fracked up to 18 times, and that less than half the “produced” waste-water is recovered (http://www.dangersoffracking.com/). No one really knows where exactly the rest of it goes, and the industry not only ignores this issue, but once the wells are sealed and the site “restored,” the company packs up and leaves. It’s important to note that “restored” means little more than planting a cosmetic layer of grass, and that “pack up and leave” is typically followed by significant economic hardship for communities whose ancillary businesses—hotels, restaurants, and taverns—have become dependent on the dollars spent by gas-workers imported from Texas, Oklahoma, or Louisianna—and I haven’t even addressed the increase, ranging from chemical to mechanical—of exposure to hazards affecting gas industry workers. We could also talk for a good while about the uptick in crimes associated with alcoholism, drug abuse, sexual assault, and sexually transmitted disease in communities that host gas-related “man camps” (http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/inside-frackings-man-camps-where-sex-drugs-and-gonorrhea-run-rampant), the many regions across the U.S. who’ve experienced a surge of drilling and/or waste-water injection well related earthquakes, and the community division that results from pressures on hospital emergency services resulting from all three of these (http://documents.foodandwaterwatch.org/doc/Social_Costs_of_Fracking.pdf). Earthquakes eported in Texas and Oklahoma, along with similar reports from regions with scant history of seismic activity like Ohio, Colorado, and California have not to date produced documented fatalities, but what experts suggest is that smaller quakes are likely to be followed by larger ones. The point, of course, is that any and all of these issues characterize “fracking” (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/07/14/fracking-earthquake_n_5585892.html).

But even these facts represent only a fraction of the real and potential future hazards associated with fracking—especially in light of extremely poor reporting by an industry left largely to police itself, the illegal dumping of waste fluids and other hazardous materials well beyond the documented cases, the unknown hazards associated with the combined effects of chemical interactions in frack waste water left at the drill site, and the effects of the massive use of biocides in the drilling process for human and nonhuman species.  Benzene alone is associated with rashes, severe nose-bleeds, dizziness, difficulty breathing, gastrointestinal distress, vomiting, and headache, and fatigue (http://emba.villanova.edu/content/dam/villanova/sustainability/McD-LFrackingEnvironmentHealth.pdf). One scientist at Villanova University estimates that “[o]f the more than 350 [chemicals used in fracking] that were investigated further, 75% were found to potentially affect the respiratory and gastrointestinal systems, the liver, and various sensory organs. Moreover, more than half of these chemicals could affect the brain and nervous system” (http://emba.villanova.edu/content/dam/villanova/sustainability/McD-LFrackingEnvironmentHealth.pdf).

The only really relevant questions, then, about fracking are what can be done about it beyond hand wringing and bewailing the fates of our children, and I’d argue that this latter—the fates of our children—invests us with an incorrigible moral duty not merely to inform ourselves of the facts, but to work in concert with others—locally, regionally, and globally—to agitate for the only kind of enduring change that will matter: an end to the domination of the multinationals and their analogues in government whose systemic exploitation of our resources, our labor, and our communities leaves us with a hundred choices of catsup at Walmart and a wasteland where once there was a mountain, a desert, a river, a vista. The continuation of fossil fuel production will leave our ecologies desolate, our health deteriorated, and our hope potentially damaged beyond repair. We can’t let this happen. What this means is that we too must change from insensible consumers to informed citizens, from fearfully short-sighted to ferociously future-oriented. I know that many of you have already undergone that transformation.

Equipped with some experience as an activist for women’s civil rights, nonhuman animal rights, and environmental preservation, I came to the anti-fracking movement with high hopes that, organized, vocal, and persistent, a fledgling movement would be able to make our elected representatives see and hear what was happening on the farms, the roads, in the state parks and the towns of rural Pennsylvania. I organized protests, I participated in occupations, I took literally thousands of pictures of frack pads, well-heads, pipeline cuts, compressor construction, forest liquidation, truck traffic, polluted streams, chain link fence barriers—and angry activists all over the state. I made these widely available through social media. I gave speeches beseeching my representatives to act on behalf of the constituents that elected them. I delivered carefully researched commentary to the FERC—the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. I wrote letters, went to countless hearings, and signed petitions. I wrote an incendiary blog dissecting the industry as the reckless profiteering Behemoth it is. I gave interviews to Mother Jones, National Public Radio, Democracy Now, American Prospect, and Alex Chadwick’s BURN, among others. I’ve been investigated by the state police and the FBI Eco-Terrorism Task Force. My phone’s been tapped and my house vandalized, my dogs let out the gate of my modest quarter acre. This was not fun.

I learned some very valuable lessons—that’s indeed, the last thing I hope you’ll take away today. They’re pretty straightforward, and I now regard them as crucial not only to ending the domination of the oil and gas industry, but to making possible a future worth the immense sacrifice that will be required to realize it:

·      First, in all likelihood, the agencies charged with the power and responsibility to protect our water, air, and soil are either corrupt, incompetent, impotent or all three. Appealing to them in hopes that they’ll act on our behalf may assuage our conscience, but it will not put an end to the liquidation of our ecologies and communities. The naïve belief, moreover, that environmental and labor law is drafted to protect and promote our interests needs to be scrapped. Nothing could make these facts clearer than NAFTA and now TPP.

·      Second, all the petitions, letters, blogs, speeches, comments, hearings, etc, in the world are for naught if we do not become a massive, global movement of insurgents united around a single uncompromising and unwavering message: all forms of unconventional oil and gas extraction must stop. They must stop now, and they must stop entirely. We must demand equally uncompromising action on climate change and the recognition that virtually all of the planet’s current misfortunes—including the migrations of refugees, poverty and starvation, the emergence of more virulent disease and disease vectors, terrorism, species extinction, international and internecine war, and the perilous loss of clean water—have as their foundation the deterioration of our environmental conditions. Environmental integrity is the only soil in which justice can grow to maturity; it is the only ground in which just institutions can become rooted and enduring.

·      Third, although we’re routinely fear-mongered into believing that acts of civil disobedience are inherently violent in virtue of their violation of the law, the fact of the matter is that this is a falsehood intended to intimidate and silence us. Indeed, we must become more willing than ever to absorb the pepper-spray, the baton blows, the verbal assaults and the bullets of governments who deploy law enforcement to insure the uninterrupted flow of petroleum and petro-dollars into the bank accounts of its corporate benefactors. Like those of the American Civil Rights Movement, our actions must be timely, well-planned, creative, loud, and enduring. But they must be more. They must be global in their scope, their inclusion of marginalized voices, and in their objectives. They must take the rights of communities seriously—but not at the forfeiture of organizing across borders—geographical or ideological. Our insurgency must, I think, take as its galvanizing point of departure the clear understanding that an industry willing to extract profits—quite literally—from the bone marrow of the planet at the direct expense of its capacity to support life is essentially nihilistic. Our concerted and relentless protest is thus an act of self-defense.

·      Lastly, unlike many in the Pennsylvania anti-fracking movement, we must not give up hope. This “giving up” come in at least three varieties:

o   The first is that of the “fracktivist” who satisfies her or himself that signing the next petition will be sufficient to make a difference. They know better, but insofar as denial is a form of resignation, such “activism” is more like walking away from the struggle than onto the battlefield.

o   The second is the well-meaning organizer who has bought into the false belief that acts of civil disobedience are beyond the pale of legitimate protest; they too know that without a massive presence holding up signs and giving speeches in front of government and/or corporate offices will not likely be effective. Even the 400,000 at New York City’s March for Climate Action has accomplished fairly little because its events—however large—were predictably scripted; its organizers suitably intimidated by the prospect of arrest.

o   Third—and perhaps most troubling—are those among the “professional organizers” who depend on the continuation of the crisis, whose careers are tethered to being heroes of a “movement,” and whose incomes derive not from the hope that a better future is possible, but from the anxiety and terror of a volatile present. The Sierra Club, the Environmental Defense Fund, the Audubon Society, and several others—these are not our allies, and they will gladly use us—characterizing us as terrorists and radicals—to make their own compromising corporate-friendly positions appear sensible and good. Our first responsibility, then, is to the kind of critical analysis that permits us to see through hype and propaganda to the only hope worth pursuing—that which offers to our children a future worth their own.

On this last note, however, I realize I’m speaking not so much to you, but to my fellows in the U.S., people for whom my heart breaks. For even though we may not face the prospect that we could be murdered for speaking out against this criminal activity, we face the culpability of being citizens of one of the most powerful nations on the planet, a nation whose flag is deployed as propaganda by Exxon-Mobil, Anadarko, Chesapeake, and Chevron—among so many others. What you face is violence; what we face is shame. Which is worse, I’m not sure I know.

Wendy Lynne Lee

Community Rights or Games of Thrones? Response to Thomas Linzey, the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund

Comments Posted at :

http://inthesetimes.com/rural-america/entry/18329/the-myth-of-community-rights

Thomas Linzey of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) certainly makes a persuasive argument with respect to the plainly undemocratic effectively dictatorial powers wielded by corporations. He is also, I think, dead-on concerning the very limited scope of recent court decisions that provide, as he puts it, only ephemeral success to municipalities--communities that have earnestly sought to act in the best interest of their constituents. 

But there are serious problems--and they come to this:

Linzey doesn't go far enough to articulate either what is a community or--and intimately related--where the powers of a community ends and those of a state or federal government are legitimately exercised.

These are crucial issues. Here are just a few examples:

1. What in Linzey's argument prevents a community of the very wealthy from advancing a bill of rights that bans, say, fracking infrastructure within that community--but leaves open the possibility that the municipality nearby--one inhabited by poorer folks with fewer resources--will become a sacrifice zone?
In other words, what in this argument bars me from defining "community" as the economic bastion of the wealthy--at the expense of the less well-to-do? 
What prevents "community rights" from simply deteriorating into a version of NIMBY-ism for those who can afford the lawyers? 
This is no idle question. 
I have watched first hand--over and over--in Pennsylvania communities of the working class become the fracking cesspools of the gas industry--all the while communities better off win (however brief) respite from this industrial assault.

2. What in Linzey's argument prevents a community from adopting grossly unjust statutes such as one that condones slavery or one that effectively dispossesses women? Linzey might respond that because such statutes are intrinsically inconsistent with the concept of equality and justice, they'd never pass muster within any legitimate constitution. 
But this response is inadequate since 

(a) Linzey already effectively accedes to economic/class divisions by omission (see (1)), and 

Photo Wendy Lynne Lee, May 2015

(b) like Ancient Greece, it is entirely within the self-accorded rights of a community to determine what counts as a "member." What, in other words, prevents a community from defining membership in terms of, say, sex, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation/identity--or class? What, in fact decides even whether "community" need be geographically bounded? (in which case, all bets are off with respect to any democratic principles governing membership).

3. What in Linzey's argument prevents a community from adopting grossly unjust statutes governing, for example, speech or other forms of expression? 
Could a community whose majority of members want a fracking ban vote to silence or exile opposing members? 
Do communities have the right to censor their membership if that member's speech is perceived as a threat to the integrity or cohesion of the community? 
Who's authorized to make these determinations in particular cases?

4. Finally--and what 1-3 clearly add up to: what is the legitimate place of the state or federal government with respect to its relationship to communities? 
This is thorny to be sure--but what does Linzey envision--a confederation of loosely knit but entirely independent communities as opposed to a "united states"? 
What happens when the action of one community poses potential harm to another? 
For example, do communities really have the right to decide against vaccines? 
Do they really have the right to erect barriers to keep out "strangers"? 
Should every community be responsible for its own militia? 
What about a community who wants as many frack pads and pipelines as they can squeeze in--at the direct cost of water contamination for their neighbors? 
What of the community who wants to build a flood wall--and makes their poorer neighbors the victims of the next hurricane? 
What about a community that determines it's in their best interest to make a communal living off puppy mills? 
Rare earth mineral extraction? 
Can communities impose a religion on their members? 
Can communities impose any variety of qualification for membership? 

Who decides that?

What Linzey appears to assume is that every community presented with the option would--suitably educated--reject energy industrialization (or factory farms or pharmaceutical manufacture, or Monsanto, etc). 
But this is clearly not the case. 
In fact, the opposite is true--and that is among the reasons we do not have any cohesive movement in the U.S. that would undertake the revolution he calls for. In fact--a loose confederation of not-necessarily-cohesive communities might actually agitate against that revolution--deteriorating into a panoply of special interest enclaves as opposed to communities of genuinely democratic citizens. 

And that's a game of thrones--not a place anyone with any sense wants to live.

These are just a few of the admittedly tough philosophical questions that CELDF needs to address. 
But they're not merely philosophical--real people, real nonhuman animals, and real ecologies can be harmed immensely by communities, and appealing to community rights will be no panacea to prevent this. 
There is a place for larger government. 
I don't think Linzey denies this--but he also doesn't spell out what--or where--this is. 
And without it, no revolution will be possible. 
Or, perhaps better: a confederation of "communities" can certainly generate the conditions of violent sectarianism just as readily as democratic decision-making. 
How does Linzey assure us that we'll get the second in the course of the revolution he proposes?

I agree with Linzey that corporatist domination must end. 
But it's end will not by itself usher in a new day for democracy.

That revolution demands much much more.

Wendy Lynne Lee

Professor

Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania

wlee@bloomu.edu/https://bloomu.academia.edu/WendyLee

With Facebook Friends Like These...: How a Self-Described "Ms. Witchdoctress" "Gets Rid" of Gadflies

Julie Ann Edgar, Inauguration of Governor Tom Wolf, 2015
Photo, Wendy Lynne Lee

The purpose of the following is to prevent harm, defend free exchange, and tell the truth.

But--especially to prevent harm.

The note below hails from self-described "Ms. Witchdoctress" Julie Ann Edgar. She posted it to her Facebook friends on a thread concerning appropriate remedies to bee-sting after she banned me from the thread. 

I could, of course, not see the post, and "Ms. Witchdoctress" apparently assumed it would not make its way to me. 

But it did.

To put it another, more explicit, way: 

Ms. Edgar determined that for whatever reason (we'll pursue that below), I ought not to participate in this discussion, so she banned me from it--rendering me defenseless against the excoriating tirade she then posted. 

I quote it here in full, and with sincere thanks to the source who believed I had a right to see it--that I have a right to self-defense, especially against attacks that come without provocation, without forewarning, and--as we'll see--without an once of justification.

Greetings friends, i have blocked Wendy from this thread she has chosen to hijack for her obviously pathological vampiric energy needs.  

I have answers to her many criticisms, but it is my opinion that she presents them mostly because she needs attention and not because she would listen to a damn word i said if i bothered to respond to all of them.  

I am saddened at her ignorance because Quantum physics will continue to bear out that many things she is falsely claiming are pseudoscience are absolutely NOT-- 

 and she who considers herself an ecofeminist is surely NOT, because a pillar of ecofeminism is the validation of the witchdoctress/botanical healer archetype, and the validation of nonlinear ways of knowing.  

I don't have the patience to deal with these spurious claims, and since this is my wall, i have gotten rid of her.  

It is obvious from her disproportionate response and UBER-argumentative style that she seeks attention more than anything else.  

Namaste~

First, some context:

The discussion was about remedies for bee sting. Julie had recommended Tea Root--Melaleuca. While I cannot produce her exact words--as I am banned from the thread--she had clearly recommended it for a wasp sting, and claimed that she had "run, not walked" to access the remedy. She strongly implied that Melaleuca was a remedy as opposed to a mere analgesic, and later in the thread she bragged that she had "saved" many children by making this "remedy" available to their parents at places like parks.

When the post came up in my Facebook feed, I had to respond for two reasons:

First, while I do not know exactly what Ms. Edgar meant by "saved," what I do know is that Melaleuca is nothing more than a modest pain-reliever. It will have no effect whatever in case of allergic reaction. 

That means it will have no effect whatever in case of anaphylaxis. 

To therefore recommend it without being very clear for what it's intended is simply irresponsible, and it had to be said. 

I know this firsthand: Several years ago I was stung by three wasps on my back porch.  I barely made it to the phone to hit 911 before I began to suffocate. It was terrifying, and people die from this kind of allergic reaction.  

From the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Insect sting Anaphylaxis: INSECT STING ANAPHYLAXIS

Second, though a native tree of Australia, Melaleuca is an extremely damaging invasive in the United States, especially in Florida where it is responsible for tremendous species and habitat loss. 

For sources, please see:

Melaleuca


http://pesticide.ifas.ufl.edu/courses/pdfs/melaleuca/Melaleuca.pdf

Melaleuca Trees in South Florida - YouTube

So, here's an argument:

Since Melaleuca is no more effective for treating non-allergic bee sting than, say baking soda; since the only sort of bee sting you'd "run, not walk!" to treat needs the intervention of epinephrine--an epi-pen--why would you recommend an invasive species plant responsible for wildlife decimation?

In other words, if baking soda works just as well for non-allergic bee sting, why would you risk contributing to the destruction of Florida wildlife? I thought that's what the gas companies did.

Ms. Edgar's response was that she purchased the Melaleuca from botanicals in Australia--hence she's not personally contributing to the decimation of habitat in Florida.

Well and good.

But consider two things:

1. Melaleuca, Inc--The Wellness Company--controls a virtual monopoly on the plant in Australia. Buying Melaleuca from Australia virtually requires that you join Melaleuca, Inc--for $45.00 per month. 

Melaleuca, Inc. is owned by Frank L. VanderSloot, the profoundly anti-gay campaign chief for Mitt Romney, and "major financial contributor to Republican campaigns" in Idaho--the corporate home of the company. He also donates heavily to the American Heritage Charter School, a far right wing K-12 that advertises itself a "free, rigorous, and patriotic" (American Heritage Charter School - Home). And VanderSloot has a nasty reputation for "threatening to sue just about anyone who puts his name in print"--that's one way, after all, of banning a critic (Mitt Romney's Money Man: Who Is Frank L. VanderSloot? - DailyFinance).

For more about VanderSloot's own version of "silence the critic," see: Billionaire Romney donor uses threats to silence critics - Salon.com

 

Melaleuca Inc. has been described by Forbes this way: "Melaleuca is a pyramid selling organization, built along the lines of Herbalife and Amway" (If You Believe - Forbes).

From Daily Finance:

To sell these wares -- and "350 other household and 'health' products" -- VanderSloot relies on what Forbes describes as "an army of part-time hucksters." For Melaleuca is essentially a pyramid scheme -- or, more politely, a "multilevel marketing firm," like Amway or Herbalife (HLF) -- in which so-called independent marketing executives make money by peddling the company's dietary supplements and cleaning products, as well as recruiting more salespeople (the newer recruits being on the lower levels of the pyramid).

This business model has been spectacularly successful for VanderSloot (who stands, of course, at the pyramid's apex). Melaleuca had $1 billion in revenue last year, according to Mother Jones, which points out the glaring disparity between the earnings potential advertised for would-be salespeople and the real income those "marketing executives" derive. 

On the its website, "Melaleuca pitches itself as a means to gain the economic freedom to live your dream life -- all while working flexible hours at home." A video shows several women who "claim to have made six-figure incomes through Melaleuca," Mother Jones reports. "One says she's earned more than $500,000."
The actual annual average earnings of a Melaleuca salesperson: a paltry $85 a year. 

You have to be a member of the Wellness Company to purchase its products. From the Website:

Discover all the ways that Melaleuca enhances the lives of thousands of people just like you by helping people reach their goals. Learn how members of Melaleuca are spending less money for safer, more effective products, getting out of debt, and making a difference in the lives of those they touch.

Whomever is a member is also expected to "huckster" for a company CEO who "ostensibly believes that the Garden of Eden was located in Jackson County, Missouri, and that Native Americans are actually Jews" (The Most Loathsome People in America: The Double Dirty Dozen | Alternet). 

So given that it is very hard to acquire Melaleuca from Australia any other way that through VanderSloot, we are entitled to infer the following about Ms. Edgar's insistence that she does not contribute to the decimation of species and habitat in Florida:

a. Ms. Edgar buys from the Wellness Company, but does not know who VanderSloot is. Fine--but utterly without excuse--in which case she is also presumably a salesperson for the company. Ms. Edgar has an undergraduate degree in Philosophy--and with that her excuse for not knowing better--for not having better critical thinking skills-- evaporates. 

b. Ms. Edgar buys from the Wellness Company, and does know its story, but doesn't care. Fine, but this would make her morally reprobate. 

b. Ms. Edgar somehow acquires her Melaleuca another way. Fine--but this defies credulity. Perhaps she could offer receipts from that company. One option might be Emmi's Essentials--very hard to locate--and raises at least two other questions.

This brings us to point (2).

a) Perhaps Ms. Edgar is buying Melaleuca from some other company, say Emmi's Essentials, where it retails for $35.00 for two ounces. Another fine. What the "Witchdoctress" decides to spend her own money on is her business. This is, however, the same Ms. Edgar who in late 2012 posted a Fundrazr Campaign titled "Help Julie's Family Stay Off the Street," raising $1,050 dollars (Yasni result for https://fundrazr.com/campaigns/8PLQ5). 

As recently as July 2015, Ms. Edgar made a similar pitch to pay for veterinary care for her two cats, Cammie and Porchie and raised another $1000.00 (Please help us take our two sick cats to the vet. by Julie Edgar).

To be very very clear: charitable giving is a good thing. 

Do it. Do it often.

But it is a far cry from charitable giving to be solicited to support the veterinary care to supplement the funds for someone who, by her own admission (see Fundrazr (1)) cannot in fact adequately support her own children. 

In fact, it is cruel to the animals--and to the kids.

And it is crazily hypocritical for someone who insists rightly on her Facebook page that we ought not to eat pigs to assume responsibility for animals whom she cannot even get adequately treated for ringworm.

Not rocket science: if you cannot take full care--veterinary, not absurd "Witchdoctress"--care for your animals, do not acquire them.

What makes this post especially rankling, however, is this: Ms Edgar claims that not only are her cats sick, but so too are her daughters--that they've "ALL" had ringworm since February, and that they're living in filthy conditions.

She lives in Bethlehem. Here's the websites for the Bethlehem Clinic:

http://www.freeclinics.com/cit/pa-bethlehem

Here's an option for a low-cost veterinarian:

http://www.affordablepetvaccines.com/

Why hasn't Ms. Edgar sought better treatment--since February--for her daughters? This is what makes it very hard not to wonder:

Does she have the same apparently faulty beliefs about medicine in general that she has about how to treat bee sting? That some "natural botanical" will do the trick? If so, why should others be expected to pay for treating the damage when her bullshit botanical treatments don't work?

To the retort that how she cares for her kids and her cats is none of my or anyone's business, I say this: of course it is; she made it my business--and everyone's--the moment she asked for money in cyberspace.

This is how people and critters get really really hurt. 

This is how Ms. Edgar's cats and kids have been allowed to suffer unnecessarily. 

Ms. Edgar makes it a point to advertise herself as a "single mom and entrepreneur" claiming that she's got an interview for her "dream organizing position" in July. But while she waits for that "dream job," her kids and her animals are suffering. And that is not ok. She calls her situation "legitimate and extreme exigency." But why is that? I too have been a single parent most of my adult life, but what that has meant is that I have worked jobs I hated, lived within my means, put myself through school, and educated my children. This was very hard, and it is absolutely harder for women. But it did not entitle me to not seek out care for my children when they were sick (or substitute magical thinking for medicine); it did not entitle me to solicit money when things got really bad, it did not entitle me to acquire animals I could not care for--and it did not entitle me to subscribe to a raft of homeopathic, "natural" cockamamy that hurts people.

All of this brings me, finally, to Ms. Edgar's very nasty and rather nefarious post above.

Let's consider:

Claim 1: "i have blocked Wendy from this thread she has chosen to hijack for her obviously pathological vampiric energy needs."

Because Ms. Edgar does not specify in any fashion what "vampiric energy needs" refers to, there is no way to respond. This is name-calling pure and simple. I was having a very civil and interesting conversation with a gentleman named Robert. He and I agreed on some things and not on others. That is called "having a conversation." If Ms. Edgar really sees having a conversation as a "hijack," then what she's really after is either silence or unalloyed agreement. But in that case, it seems her commitment to free exchange is rather anemic. Maybe some Melaleuca ointment will help that out. 

Claim 2: "I have answers to her many criticisms, but it is my opinion that she presents them mostly because she needs attention and not because she would listen to a damn word i said if i bothered to respond to all of them."

If Ms. Edgar has answers to my criticisms, why doesn't she offer them? If not for me, for the benefit of her readers? What difference does it make whether I'm after attention or not? If she indeed does believe in the ascribed properties of Melaleuca, why not use this opportunity to educate? How does Ms. Edgar know I'm uninterested in listening? Answer: she doesn't. Indeed, the facts are she doesn't have the goods. The properties she wants to ascribe to Melaleuca are easily replaceable by baking soda or mud--and for a lot less money. This is actually just another variety of name-calling--and as such the refuge of she who, not having a good argument, goes for the next best thing--dismissal of the arguer through ridicule--and then banishment. Perhaps I can use my magical consciousness to re-insert myself on the bee-sting thread. Or, well, no.

Claim 3: "I am saddened at her ignorance because Quantum physics will continue to bear out that many things she is falsely claiming are pseudoscience are absolutely NOT--" 

This is a particularly tortured sentence, but I gather Ms. Edgar's claiming that Quantum Mechanics will bear out that homeopathic "natural" medicine" is legitimate and that Western medicine is bad. And I gather she premises this claim on the idea that Quantum Mechanics implies that human consciousness is somehow in control of reality. She is entirely unspecific, so it's difficult to know what she thinks is defensible, but we can say this:

The appeal to quantum mechanics by magical thinkers opposed to "linear thinking" are very old, and long-discredited both on empirical--evidenced--grounds and on their internally incoherent and inconsistent logic. The 2004 film "What the #$!%* Do We Know!?" and its 2006 expansion "What the Bleep, Down the Rabbit Hole" re-newed some of the enthusiasm for what New York Times writer, Dennis Overbye, describes as follows:

The "rabbit hole" in the title refers to the philosophical muddle that the contemplation of quantum mechanics, the paradoxical laws that govern subatomic life, can lead to. And it is a legitimate and maddening one. Quantum physics proclaims, for example, that an electron (or any object, elementary particle or not) is both a particle and a wave before we look at it, a conundrum neatly illustrated by a cartoon featuring "Dr. Quantum" in the new film.

Physicists have been at war for the last century trying to explain how it is that the fog of quantum possibilities prescribed by mathematical theory can condense into one concrete actuality, what physicists call "collapsing the wavefunction." Half a century ago the physicist and Nobel Prize winner Eugene Wigner ventured that consciousness was the key to this mysterious process.

Wigner thereby, and inadvertently, launched a thousand New Age dreams. Books like "The Tao of Physics" and "The Dancing Wu Li Masters" have sought to connect quantum physics to Eastern mysticism. Deepak Chopra, the physician and author, has founded a career on the idea of "quantum healing," and a school of parapsychology has arisen based on the idea that things like telekinesis and telepathy were a result of probing minds' manipulation of the formless quantum potential. And now the movie. 

All of them promote the idea that, at some level, our minds are in control of reality. We are in charge of the holodeck, as one of the characters in "Down the Rabbit Hole" says. And if it doesn't work for you, it's probably because you don't believe. 

So what's wrong with that? Like everyone else, I am inspired by stories of personal change. The ideas that consciousness creates reality and that anything is possible make for terrific psychology.
We all know that self-confidence breeds its own success. I wish I were a member of that club. 

But physics has moved on. 

It has been decades since anybody took Wigner's idea seriously, said David Albert, a professor of philosophy and physics at Columbia, who has the dubious honor of being one of the talking heads in both "What the Bleep" films and is not pleased with the results. 

Many physicists today say the waves that symbolize quantum possibilities are so fragile they collapse with the slightest encounter with their environment. Conscious observers are not needed. As Dr. Albert pointed out, Wigner framed the process in strict mathematical and probabilistic terms. "The desires and intentions of the observer had nothing to do with it," he said. 

In other words, reality is out of our control. It's all atoms and the void, as Democritus said so long ago. Indeed, some physicists say the most essential and independent characteristic of reality, whatever that is, is randomness. It's a casino universe. (Far Out, Man. But Is It Quantum Physics? - New York Times).

In other words, the Quantum-consciousness-control-of-reality stuff is far-out--way far-out, but it is also bull shit. Science has moved on, and so must we--at least where the health and lives of other people depend on it.  

Indeed, if we do not demand good evidence under repeatably controlled experimental conditions, we are every bit as guilty of perpetrating bull shit as are the climate change deniers, the creationists, and the folks who claim that tobacco doesn't cause lung cancer. 

We are, in fact, exactly the same. If this is what Ms. Edgar believes, it amounts to new age fluffer-nutter.

Claim 4: "and she who considers herself an ecofeminist is surely NOT, because a pillar of ecofeminism is the validation of the witchdoctress/botanical healer archetype, and the validation of nonlinear ways of knowing."

Eco-Feminism is an enormous field in philosophy, and many other disciplines. The term was coined by French feminist Françoise d'Eaubonne  in 1974. There is one variety of ecofeminism that subscribes to these mostly stereotypical images of healers, witchdoctresses, and nonlinear thinking. This is appropriately referred to as "radical cultural feminism," and is represented by, among others, the late Mary Daly. But these positions are routinely challenged from across the feminist disciplines--especially feminist science studies theorists like Donna Haraway, Katherine Hayles, Sandra Harding, Greta Gaard, and Karen Warren. 

I routinely contribute scholarly work to this discipline, and that can be found here: Wendy Lynne Lee | Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania - Academia.edu, and especially in my 2010 book, Contemporary Feminist Theory and Activism, Broadview. Ms. Edgar might also avail herself of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's entry on Ecofeminism: Feminist Environmental Philosophy (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). Among the things she might learn is that there continues to be a serious conflict among deep ecologists--more the Quantum Fluffer-Nutter sorts--and many ecofeminists who argue that identification with some notion of a universal consciousness is precisely contrary to women's liberatory aspirations since it requires self-abnegation--and that's what women have long had to contend with from men. 

 Indeed, the efforts to elevate the mother image in the interest of reclaiming women's "power" are at great risk of back-firing since these are the very same images that heteropatriarchal cultures have utilized to institutionalize oppression. I take this theme up at great length in my new book, Eco-Nihilism: The Philosophical Geopolitics of the Apocalypse, Lexington, 2016, where I evaluate some of the strategies of the anti-fracking movement in Pennsylvania from an ecofeminist point of view, and particularly with respect to the resistance strategies of Sandra Steingraber and Naomi Klein. In short, validation of healer, mother, etc. images is not a "pillar" of ecofeminism; it is simply one---and one long-critiqued from within feminism--theoretical avenue. 

Not really a claim 5: "I don't have the patience to deal with these spurious claims, and since this is my wall, i have gotten rid of her.  It is obvious from her disproportionate response and UBER-argumentative style that she seeks attention more than anything else." 

Having mostly canvassed Ms. Edgar's penchant for name-calling, dismissal, ridicule, and banishment, I'll only note this: "i have got rid of her." 

Wow. 

I wonder if Melaleuca can address that sort of arrogance that allows someone to treat others like the greasy bacon-burger wrapper they just threw out.

Namaste,

Wendy Lynne Lee