NEWS

Photo credit: From www.unwomen.org.

By Mary Ann Koch
Des Moines, IA Branch

Having spent several days in New York City attending CSW63 (the 63rd session of the UN Commission on the Status of Women) from March 7-17, 2019, as a L2G (Local to Global) representative, it is a challenge to integrate the experience within oneself. There were the people and the cars constantly moving, Consultation Day with an introduction to CSW, the thrill of an official UN pass, attending numerous presentations, meeting the practicum students and women from around the world, and last but not least, a hot dog off a food cart in Central Park at the Children’s Climate March. And these are just a few of the experiences I had those ten days.

As an activist and a member of the leadership team of our WILPF Des Moines Branch, how shall I take a global experience and integrate it into the local arena which is my life? Since I have returned home, I have been grappling with that until I viewed the experience through the feminine lens of what is at my heart’s center—oneness and wholeness.

Some presentations that still stand out to me are Infrastructure and Sustainable Development, Leadership Development for Women and Girls, Unpaid Care-Work and Its Consequences, and Northeast Asian Women Lead Peace on the Korean Peninsula. After I attended an introduction to Women, War & Peace II while in New York, and viewed the episodes about the work of women in bringing peace to table in Northern Ireland and at the first Intifada, I was awed. Over and over,, it was brought home to me the tremendously unique and significant contribution the feminist approach makes in our world.

We each have our own role to play in our daily lives. My calling to local activism looks quite different than the calling of the practicum students who were also sponsored by WILPF. They seem to be called to more global activism. One calling might be seen as more significant than the other, however, where would one be without the other? The German philosopher Immanuel Kant once said that the whole is an “integrative relational structure” in which we are all parts. It is my firm conviction that we are each absolutely necessary in bringing about the common good.

One last thought that I would like to share comes from Dahr Jamail and Barbara Cecil in Rethinking Activism in the Face of Catastrophic Biological Collapse. They are writing about our climate crisis, but their words can easily be applied to working for peace and freedom:

What if all the fixing and mitigating and adapting fail? Perhaps we will have become worthy human beings, having acted during this time of crisis with extraordinary love and integrity. We will turn toward one another and all the beings on the planet, with clear and humble love, knowing we are one living whole. On bended knee, we will weep in abject gratitude for the gift of life itself entrusted to us. In this is profound meaning and purpose.

For more information, contact me at: kochmaryamm2014@gmail.com.

Inset Photo: A panel discussion entitled “Northeast Asian Women Lead: Peace on the Korean Peninsula” was presented by Women Cross DMZ and the Nobel Women's Initiative. Kozue Akibayashi, past president of WILPF international, is seated second from the left.

A still photo from one of the videos that Pat Elder made on his “Million Parts per Trillion Tour”; all the videos can be found at civilianexposure.org. China Lake Naval Air Weapons Station, located 150 miles north of Los Angeles, was Stop #1.

By Pat Elder
WILPF US Member

“If the Bill of Rights contains no guarantee that a citizen shall be secure against lethal poisons distributed either by private individuals or by public officials, it is surely only because our forefathers, despite their considerable wisdom and foresight, could conceive of no such problem.”   
    ― Rachel Carson, Silent Spring

From February 23 to March 1, I drove across the country with my daughter Holly in a week to draw attention to the reckless behavior of the military as it continues to poison the waters of America.
 
We billed our trip “The Million Parts per Trillion Tour” because we stopped at eight extremely contaminated bases, all with more than a million parts per trillion (ppt) of deadly Per and Poly Fluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) in the groundwater.
 
We worked with WILPF US and Civilian Exposure from Camp Lejeune, NC.
 
PFAS is found in the aqueous film-forming foam (AFFF) the military uses to extinguish massive fires during routine training exercises on their bases. These highly toxic and carcinogenic chemicals are allowed to leach into ground and sewer. PFAS is also found in Teflon and other products, and is known as the “forever chemical” because it never degrades in the environment; it is the poison that poisons forever.

The former England Air Force Base in Alexandria, Louisiana, was the most severely contaminated place we visited, with 10,970,000 parts per trillion (ppt) of PFAS in the groundwater. We saw impoverished communities served by well water near that base. View a YouTube video about this visit here.

The press is silent, and people don’t know they’re being poisoned. Not a single soul we spoke to during our tour knew of the issue. Just two of 200 (mainstream, for-profit) news agencies we contacted reached out to us, although they never ran a story.
 
The most minute traces of PFAS adversely affect women’s reproductive health and cause a variety of cancers. More than a third of all Americans may have PFAS-contaminated drinking water. A Harvard public health scientist says exposure of 1 ppt of PFAS is detrimental to human health.
 
Even so, the military is claiming it is free to continue using the foams and poisoning American communities, because, they say, the chemicals are not regulated by the EPA or the Department of Agriculture so it’s OK to use them. Generally, the Department of Defense (DOD) refuses to pay for cleaning up the contamination or to provide alternative drinking systems, aside from a few instances where they’ve provided bottled water to unfortunate households.
 
Furthermore, the military claims that individual states lack the “jurisdictional authority” to force the military to comply with state environmental laws. The Department of Defense claims “sovereign immunity” from state environmental regulations.
 
The military’s potential financial liability is astronomical, and this partially explains the EPA’s steadfast refusal to institute a Minimum Contaminant Level (MCL) regulation for the substances. Doing so would unleash a flood of litigation against the military here and around the world. In Germany, for example, where the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) between the US and Germany protects the US military from liability, a German town is now suing their government for health impacts.
 
Curiously, our trip has led us to focus on what we don’t know. The DOD has been testing thousands of individual wells, but in many communities they’re not publishing the results. We don’t know how far the wells they tested were located from the routine discharges of PFAS on base. We don’t know how far the deadly plumes have traveled from bases. We don’t know how deep the private wells were. We don’t know how deep the military’s wells were. We don’t know how precise their measurements were. Experts tell us the military is performing tests that are designed to miss small, yet potentially harmful, amounts of the contaminants.

We are witnessing a nightmare scenario in which state and federal regulatory agencies are at a standstill, while the military, which continues to use these chemicals, is the lead agency in charge of documenting the extent of this contamination and protecting human health.

The age of assuming the water is safe to drink in America is over. Don’t drink well water or municipal water until you’re satisfied it is not contaminated with PFAS.

You may read summaries of each base we visited, including links to the brief videos we made at each site here. Articles I’ve written about the military’s impact on the environment and public health are posted at my new website: www.militarypoisons.org.

Articles I’ve written include:

• “An Empire of Bases Poisons Water, Threatening Our Own Collapse”
• “The Military is Poisoning America’s Groundwater – A Photo Essay”
• “The Military covers up the extent of PFAS contamination across the country while it continues to poison hundreds of communities”
• “The U.S. Military is Poisoning Germany”
• "How War Pollutes the Potomac River"

Tara Copp has a number of articles at Military Times.

Nancy Price of WILPF’s Earth Democracy Committee has been sharing videos and reports from the tour, and wants WILPF members to know the following:

“It's time to rise up against the alarming contamination by the military of our drinking water that is tragically affecting the health of on-base personnel and residents in neighboring communities. Pat's account of his ‘Million Parts per Trillion Tour’ is just one part of the story. Earth Democracy looks forward to working with Pat in the future.”
 

WILPF US shared an ad in the Young Feminist Leadership Conference Program Book, the next step in a fruitful collaboration that has led to a series of articles in Ms. Magazine called “Women Unscrewing Screwnomics.” This series could help raise WILPF’s profile and impact us in other positive ways.

By Marybeth Gardam
Chair, Corporations v Democracy Issue Committee
 
Women, emerging feminist leaders, an economy that finally works for women, and WILPF…. it’s all coming together.

The collaboration between the WILPF US Corporations v Democracy Issue Committee and Screwnomics author Rickey Gard Diamond brought us an invitation to partner with the Young Feminist Leadership Conference, held March 9-11, 2019 in the Washington, DC area, co-sponsored by Ms. Magazine.  

Rickey never fails to mention and promote WILPF at all her book tour stops. And she has been including us in strategic connections she’s making with the New Economy Coalition, a dynamic collection of folks dedicated to advocating for an economic system that works for all of us.

“By focusing on voices not typically part of mainstream man-to-man economic discourse, the articles will mainstream news of hopeful and practical changes already underway, celebrating an economy waged as life, not as war.”
        —Rickey Gard Diamond, Screwnomics author and WILPF US partner

Recently Rickey successfully pitched an idea for a series of articles in Ms. Magazine called “Women Unscrewing Screwnomics,” about the sheroes who are working nationally and internationally to create a fairer economy for women and families. Each article includes WILPF in the byline, as Rickey continues to keep us front and center in her presentations around the country.

**We’ll keep members updated by featuring the articles from Ms. on our website.**

How Can You Take Advantage of the National Publicity?

Plan NOW to start a “Women Unscewing Screwnomics” group in your community  with WILPF leading the discussion to focus on local solutions.

“Women Unscewing Screwnomics” is being piloted in WILPF’s St. Louis Branch. Branch leader Lynn Sableman says they are using it as a way to connect with new allies and collaborators in their community, as well as to engage a new segment of women who are learning how economics and peace are connected. They’re planning for a bookstore visit to the area by Rickey, and using it to promote continued discussion groups.
 
If you or your branch want more information about how to launch and promote a Screwnomics  group in your area, contact us at mbgardam@gmail.com.  

WILPF women understand the deep connection between economic injustice and the funding and promotion of more conflict and war. Screwnomics helps ordinary women not yet aware of that connection to see how the pressure they are feeling on Main Street has everything to do with the decisions made on Wall Street, and the men who call the shots.

Let’s take advantage of the national publicity we’re getting through this series of articles tying peace and economic justice to WILPF.   

On World Water Day in 2017, San Francisco-East Bay Branch members stand in front of the former Bechtel Corporation headquarters in San Francisco. From left: Anne Politeo, Barbara Blong, Deetje Boler, and Betty Traynor. Bechtel, a private corporation, “serve[s] the Infrastructure; Nuclear, Security & Environmental; Oil, Gas & Chemicals; and Mining & Metals markets.” Photo credit: Elena Rogan.

By Nancy Price
Earth Democracy

Are we moving toward realizing the promise of Earth Day and Martin Luther King’s called-for “revolution of values”? Now’s the time to “Ask the Candidates” to support policies to bring us full circle toward realizing the visions of Senator Gaylord Nelson and Martin Luther King.  

We have a handout available for tabling at your Earth Day solidarity event, or whatever event you will be participating in. It fits on one 8 ½ x 11 double-sided page; please download and print out.

What follows are the opening paragraphs of this handout, which gives historical overviews of the founding of Earth Day, Martin Luther King’s call for a “revolution of values,” and the Lewis Powell memo, one of the key events which led to the business elite becoming an ever-increasingly powerful force in US politics.

The Founding of Earth Day

Over the 1960s, environmental and anti-war activists began thinking they’d had enough of corporate environmental disasters—Love Canal (1953), the consequence of indiscriminate spraying of DDT revealed by Rachel Carson in Silent Spring (1962), assassinations (President Kennedy, Malcom X, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy), the violence of the Chicago convention and escalation of the Vietnam war with carpet-bombing, Agent Orange, the My Lai atrocity, and expansion into Cambodia.

In 1969, two iconic disasters galvanized the public and legislators into action: In Ohio, the alarming fire on the Cuyahoga River in downtown Cleveland, and in California, the huge Santa Barbara Channel oil spill, at that time the largest oil “blowout” in U.S. waters that covered 30 miles of sandy beaches and significantly affected marine life.

It was no surprise, then, that when Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson proposed Earth Day for April 22, 1970, 20 million people turned out to peacefully demonstrate.

In quick succession, Congress under President Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency (1970) and passed the Clean Air (1970), Clean Water (1972) and Endangered Species (1973) Acts. These all had precursors in the1960s when municipal and state governments, as well as Congress, alarmed by increasing illegal dumping of toxic waste and air, land and water pollution had passed laws to limit corporate harm to public health and ecosystems.

Martin Luther King’s “Revolution of Values”
 
On this first 1970 Earth Day, Sen. Nelson expressed his hope to “build bridges between man and nature’s systems, instead of more highways and dams and new weapon systems that escalate the arms race.”

Indeed, Nelson seemed to echo Martin Luther King, Jr’s revolutionary 1967 speech “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence” when King moved dramatically from civil rights to a critique of capitalism and war, calling for a “revolution of values”—a shift from a “thing-oriented" society to a “person-oriented” society.
 
He expanded on his “dream” to describe his vision of  “a worldwide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one’s tribe, race, class, and nation,” saying: “when machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”  

Nelson remarked that the “change” he and King before him envisioned called for “new standards for progress, emphasizing human dignity and well-being rather than an endless parade of technology that produces more gadgets, more waste and more pollution.”  

Share your Earth Day activities and direct any questions to: nancytprice39@gmail.com.