Our Special Earth Day Issue

Headin' for the Tar  Pits, One and All

“Mother Earth is pregnant for the third time …”
– Come on, you know the words, intone along –
“… for y’all have knocked her up,
I have tasted the maggots in the mind of the universe,
I was not offended,
For I knew I had to rise above it all,
Or drown in my own shit.”

That’s the intro to “Maggot Brain” by Funkadelic, in case you were absent when American History stopped dead as 10 minutes of Negro fuzztone lamentation washed over it in 1971. “What the truckful of fuck was that?” you might have asked then, for this was not progressive supergroup fuzz guitar; it was a raw cry, Funkadelic guitarist Eddie Hazel operating under first-take instructions from George Clinton to play as if he’d just heard his mother had died. Clinton didn’t tell him it was Mother Earth. That’s where that was coming from.

When you heard Jimi Hendrix play “Machine Gun,” you knew it was the sound of war, but from some extra-human perspective. Listen long enough and you realize it’s the cry of the planet, avulsed by napalm and carpet bombs. That’s where that was coming from.

Things were always coming from somewhere back then. “Dying trees … It’s nature’s way of telling you something’s wrong”; “Look at Mother Nature on the run in the nineteen-seventies” – that was coming from Topanga Canyon. Over in Laurel Canyon, it was “They paved paradise and put up a parking lot,” and escaping the apocalypse in wooden ships. In Brian Wilson’s purple Bel-Air retreat, the Beach Boys weren’t singing “Catch a Wave” anymore, but “Don’t Go Near the Water.” The sound from Woodland Hills was Captain Beefheart warning, “The rug’s wearin’ out that we walk on/Soon it will fray and we’ll drop dead into yesterday/Must the breathing pay for those who breathe in but don’t breathe out?”

That’s how it was circa 1970, with the best and brightest of L.A. and the world’s other cultural centers sounding the environmental alarm. And don’t forget the Motor City: “Mercy, mercy me/Things ain’t what they used to be/Where did all the blue skies go?”

They thought it was almost doomsday back when the first Earth Day took place on April 22, 1970. Now, we call it the good old days.

In 1970, the world’s human population was only 3,692,492,000. It had taken nearly 2,000 years to plump that number up from the mere 200 million who had peopled the Bible days. Now it’s taken only 38 years to bloat the 3.6 billion by another 3 billion. People may not have been listening too deeply to Marvin Gaye’s music, but they were sure fucking to it.

In 1970, gas was 34 cents a gallon and few people pondered what the lead in it was doing (outside of those in the DuPont boardroom, which had covered up lead’s deadly downside for decades). Our oceans were still teeming with fish, and they weren’t anywhere near full of mercury yet. Honking Delaware-sized chunks of Arctic and Antarctic ice shelf weren’t yet crumbling into the sea.

Back then, the weather extremes, species die-offs and oceanic dead zones of today still lived in a murky realm between scientific conjecture and science fiction. Some shit that has since come to pass even sci-fi writers couldn’t have imagined, such as in 2004, when Australia’s epic drought got so bad that thirst-crazed kangaroos began going into towns and attacking humans. Bad Kanga!

Soylent Green is people, if you’re a kangaroo.

In 1970, the dichotomy of us regarding the world as both our oyster and our toilet hadn’t taken so obvious a toll on the planet, nothing like what’s happening now. But it was enough to get people singing and organizing. Earth Day was a huge deal in which some 20 million Americans participated, and it wasn’t just Arbor Day with a splash of patchouli behind the ears. Yes, some of those 20 million were teachers and kids spending an hour at tide pools poking sea urchins, but Earth Day’s participants also fostered substantive legislative, scientific and academic change.

It has since gone global – let’s say hooray in 173 languages – but here at home Earth Day’s slowly become an other testament to our inertia, particularly over these last seven years of environmental rollback. We can bang drums and chant slogans until even the moon says shut up, but it won’t change a thing at the EPA, even though the agency owes its very existence to the first Earth Day.

Oh, tell us the story of the first Earth Day, will you, Hippie Granddad? Sure, kids. Pretend it’s a blustery day and

you’re off the California coast between Ventura and Santa Barbara, but you’re not on a boat; you’re on the Union Oil Company’s Platform A, drilling for oil. It’s six miles out at sea, where the oil is and where California’s bothersome regulations aren’t. Those end at the three mile limit, and federal regulation is much more lax. For example, out here you can use thinner sheathing in your wells.

So there you are giving old Mother Earth a good drilling when – Jiminy Cricket! – there’s a rupture, which is sort of like the rapture except instead of souls shooting up everywhere it’s millions of gallons of oil. Whoopsidaisy!

That was January 29, 1969, and the resulting oil slick covered 800 square miles along the then-pristine coast. Birds, seals, dolphins, fish and their invertebrate brethren all sucked it up – oil that is, Texas tea – and died a horrible death.

Union Oil’s president Fred Hartley was unimpressed, quoted as saying, “I am amazed at the publicity over the loss of a few birds.” But Wisconsin aenator Gaylord Nelson happened to be in Santa Barbara, witnessed the unction in action and was sufficiently appalled to shortly thereafter call for a national environmental teach-in.

Harvard University student Denis Hayes was moved by Nelson’s speech and visited the senator to see if he could help organize the teach-in on his campus. Since Nelson hadn’t yet developed the idea and had sacks of mail from Americans supporting it, he enlisted Hayes to organize the event, not just at Harvard but across the USA. From that happenstance, oil-flecked beginning, Earth Day was born.

The public will carried some weight then, and the significance of Earth Day was not lost on then-President Richard M. Nixon. Hayes once told me of a night years later that he’d spent drinking with Nixon insider John Ehrlichman, who told him that “Nixon didn’t care much for the environment and thought all this whining about pollution was a sign of moral decay, a weakening of the American fiber by people who weren’t prepared to suck it up and pay the price of progress.

“But Nixon looks out the White House window and sees the mall full of people, turns on his television and sees gigantic crowds in cities across the country, and reads the Associated Press report that more than 20 million people are involved. He had barely won in 1968 and figured he had to be a player in this.”

Nixon the tactician noted that both his chief Republican rival, New York Mayor John Lindsay, and his putative Democratic presidential opponent Edmund Muskie were involved in Earth Day. Ehrlichman told Hayes he’d suggested Nixon could outflank them by combining various elements of the Departments of the Interior, Agriculture and Health, Education and Welfare and the Atomic Energy Commission, tying a bow around them and calling it the Environmental Protection Agency. That was a direct result of Earth Day, according to Ehrlichman, who was a pretty straightforward guy if you overlook his convictions for perjury, conspiracy and obstruction of justice.

“We can change the world,” Crosby and Nash sang back then. While some things remained impossible – such as getting CS&N to sing in tune in concert – change certainly was in the air: The Clean Air bill passed, Nixon was toppled, the Vietnam War ended.

Today, people couldn’t be more anxious for change if they were stuck inside a seven-year Pampers. Watergate was a mere bagatelle compared to stuff Bush has tried to get away with, yet Bush did get away with most of it, and he just will not go away.

A great deal of the shenanigans was bad for the environment. Nearly Bush’s first act was reneging on a campaign promise to control power plants’ carbon dioxide emissions, going beyond that disgrace to also have the EPA drop its existing suits against power plant polluters. His excuse was that we needed the energy, citing as a reason California’s energy crisis, omitting that it was rigged by his friends at Enron. But why stop there? He tried to replace the Nixon-signed Clean Air Act with his Clear Skies plan, which, among other niceties, would have allowed 50 percent more carbon monoxide emissions, this despite a National Academy of Sciences estimate that the new standards 8

would cause an additional 30,000 premature U.S. deaths per year. When even the Republican Congress rejected the plan, the administration did an end-run, “reinterpreting” EPA rules, over the objections of staff and a federal advisory panel. While the smokestacks spewed, the administration was instead branding eco-terrorism as our chief domestic threat.

Since then they’ve rolled back or reversed hundreds of environmental laws, usually at the behest of lobbyists and against the better advices of government experts. Here’s one example: The flame retardants PDBEs and deca BDE are banned in Europe and elsewhere because studies found both that they disrupted the brain development, memory, learning ability and hearing of lab animal offspring and that they concentrate in humans at alarming speed. The breast milk of U.S. mothers had 70 times the PDBEs of European mothers – near the levels that were damaging lab rats – yet the Bush administration sided with lobbyists in opposing regulation. Judging by a glut of similar rulings, you’d pretty much have to be pouring effluent straight into a baby’s mouth before they’d intervene.

Lobbyists are in charge of agencies that should be policing the lobbyists’ polluting industries. Whistleblowers are fired. Science has been so censored and distorted by this administration that over 4,000 scientists, including 127 members of the staid National Academy of Sciences and 48 Nobel Prize winners, issued a 49-page detailed letter condemning it. In one example it was found that the reports of NASA’s head climate scientist, James Hansen, were being censored by a political hack, and a 23-year-old college dropout at that.

California has been particularly victimized. There was the rigged energy crisis and the higher rates the feds stuck us with. There was the emergency request from the state for FEMA’s help in clearing trees killed by bark beetles, saying they posed an imminent threat of catastrophic forest fires, a request FEMA sat on for six months, then denied on the same day that catastrophic fires swept the state. Due to federal inaction, California has been screwed out of much of the water it was getting. Then there’s the tooth and nail fight by “states’ rights” Republicans in Washington to deny California the right to set its own smog rules, as L.A.’s sky has grown more sepia by the day.

We could fill this paper with similar depressing stuff, but to what avail? It bums us out, and nothing changes. I just had to go sit under an olive tree for half an hour to watch the leaves and sky and listen for the peepings of the little brown birds in our eaves, to recall that life goes on despite our ruinous idiot schemes.

Years ago the lovely U. Utah Phillips mused, “You know, maybe we’re winning and we don’t even know it.” He was talking about the slow silent acceptance of organic foods, of neighborhood vegetable gardens, about women’s rights, gay rights and global human rights, about our growing respect for the fragility and majesty of the natural world.

There is that, but also this: Walter Cronkite once said – and I can only paraphrase from memory – that the most frightening interview he ever conducted was with a scientist who was studying the effect of pesticides and other toxins on the human brain. “You know,” the scientist said, “one day the human race is going to lose its ability to reason, and we won’t even know it.”

Colony Collapse Disorder – it’s not just for bees anymore! Where are those damn bees? Where are the salmon? Maybe the other species see the writing on the wall and are getting out while the getting’s good. Except the kangaroos. They are going to fuck you up.

Do we rise above it?

CALENDAR

So, you’ve got the holiday spirit this week and feel like giving up some hard-saved hours for Mother Earth. Rather than hear some politician stumble through public remarks or look at a bunch of green whatsits that people want you to buy, here’s CityBeat’s guide to get up, get out, and see/do something meaningful – or at least a little weird. There’s a whole world of activity out there, from the splendors of fine art to the fine art of weed-pulling.

–Alfred Lee

YELL FIRE

This one’s special: CityBeat’s sponsoring it. Even if we weren’t, though, how much would you love a “Musical Yoga Experience” with Michael Franti (Spearhead) and Seane Corn (she’ll be the one directing your down dog)? Probably a lot, right? Also: Chris Pierce, Cava, Naked Rhythm, Cipes & the People, Luminaries and more, plus your usual green magicians, live animals (PETA-friendly, one presumes), puppet shows, and other stuff. Bike, walk, train or skate, because there is a stilt circus, and you could not ask for more than that. Tues., 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Wilshire Center, Wilshire Blvd. between Western and Harvard, Los Angeles. Free.

TREASURING TRASH

Materials recycled at 2534 Eagle Rock Blvd.: Wood, paper, cardboard, newspaper, plastic, glass, tile, metal, aluminum, steel, concrete, plant material (?), toys (!) and wire. What kind of magical enviro-messiah is this place? None other than some snooty art gallery – Cactus – where group show Found exhibits works by over 30 artists who collected discarded resources and turned ’em into art. From the trash can to your wall! Reception Sat., 7-10 p.m. Closes May 8. Cactus Gallery, 2534 Eagle Rock Blvd., Eagle Rock, (323) 256-6117. Eclecticcactus.com.

SAY AWWWWWWW

Of course you’d expect a place called The Folk Tree to be playing the Earth Day card. There, we go from recycled goods to

Endangered Species, another group show dedicated to the natural world, featuring 12 artists working in painting, printmaking, assemblage, papier mache, mixed media and ceramics. From 3:15 to 5 p.m., the Pasadena Humane Society’s mobile unit will be visiting with big-eyed animals available for adoption; at the same time, the place also hosts a book event with Elizabeth Pomeroy, who’ll sign Pasadena: A Natural History. Opening reception Sat., 2-6 p.m. The Folk Tree, 217 S. Fair Oaks Ave., Pasadena, (626) 795-8733. Folktree.com.

THE SCAVENGER

If you like your Earth Day art to be more Captain Beefheart than Captain Planet, there’s the singular (in name, at least) Treiops Treyfid at MJ Higgins. Treyfid’s show, Animals of the Future, literally does away with endangered species altogether, imagining (via sculpture and mixed media 3-D) which animals will survive an oncoming ecosystem catastrophe/loss of habitat. The answer is those animals that can best thrive alongside us humans: raccoons, opossums, rats, roaches, crows, squirrels and other critters that eat our garbage and such. Reception Tues., 6-9 p.m. Closes May 3. MJ Higgins Gallery, 400 S. Main St., ste. 103, L.A., (213) 617-1700. Mjhiggins.com.

IN THE CITY

South L.A. is hardly the tree-hugging center of the green movement – maybe that’s the point of its “South L.A. Earth Day Festival,” now in its third year. (I live in not-quite-South-L.A., near ’SC, where we rely on marvelously efficient citizen-collectors for recycling instead of city waste services.) Comedian Rodney Perry hosts the all-day event, which includes health screenings, a farmers market, e-waste recycling and an urban gardening show. Sat., 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza, 3650 Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd., L.A. Info: (323) 298-5077 or Southlaearthfest.org.

HONK FOR TREES

Speaking of tree-hugging centers, Santa Monica’s Treesavers – led by peace activist staple Jerry Rubin – holds a march and rally on Tuesday, as part of a long fight against increasing odds to save those beautiful ficus trees along Second and Fourth streets in downtown Santa Monica. The city plans to replace them with ginkgos, which don’t cast as much shade, in order to make the streets more attractive to shoppers. Blech. Tues., 6 p.m. March from Santa Monica Palisades Park to Santa Monica City Hall, 1685 Main St., Santa Monica. Info: (310) 399-1000 orTreesavers. blogspot.com.

IT’S THE END OF THE WORLD…

Man, people are really excited about this 2012 business. A one-time “Earth Day L.A. Screening” of Timewave 2013: The Future Is Now is only the latest area event by and for mind-body-spiritual types (2012 is the apocalyptic last year of the Mayan calendar) living off a steady diet of yoga and aromatherapy. The 91-minute documentary covers everything from global warming to “the mystic work of Benjamin Franklin.” I don’t think they’re talking about that Puff Daddy song. Tues., 7:30 p.m. $10. Vine Theatre, 6321 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood. Info: (800) 984-0897 or Cabaretvoltaire.org.

AND I FEEL FINE

Want to really feel good about yourself? The state wants you to help clean one of its parks and wake up early on a Saturday morning. At the Ballona Wetlands Ecological reserve, volunteers get to remove invasive plant species from the sand dunes, and of course trash as well (Sat., 9:30 a.m.-12:30 p.m.; Parking at 303 Culver Blvd., Playa Del Rey; Info: 310-739-8613 or Calparks.org). Exciting opportunities such as trail maintenance and graffiti removal await at Malibu Creek State Park (9 a.m.-noon; Las Virgenes and Malibu Canyon Rd., Malibu; Info: 818-880-0372). Rio de Los Angeles State Park’s watershed restoration also includes tours for kids and plant drawing activities (9 a.m.-noon; 1900 San Fernando Rd., L.A.; Info: 323-441-8634 x18).

Earth Day High

From the Farm to Your Baggie, Mother Nature Abides

~ by Ron Garmon ~

Homegrown’s all right with me.

Homegrown is the way it should be.

Homegrown is a good thing.

Plant that bell and let it ring.

American holidays ought to come complete with a rustic Jeffersonian hymn or two and Neil Young’s canniboid dirt-ditty celebrates the wake’ n’ bake spirit that rang in the first Earth Day. Proclaimed in San Francisco in 1970 as a temporal container for growing eco-awareness, April 22 inevitably became fixed in the public mind with the aligned cultural horrors of free love, burning reefers and self-respect, with no less a bulwark of patriotic correctness than the Daughters of the American Revolution, with one matron warning Time magazine that “subversive elements plan to make American children live in an environment that is good for them.”

Well, as noted linguist Sam Goldwyn once mourned, “We’ve passed a lot of water since those days,” much of it into plastic bottles for employers to sniff for illicit substances, chiefly marijuana. Urine-testing as a condition for employment is a $4 billion a year industry spun off from the War on Drugs, a gigantic federal effort seeking to do the same execution on dope-sucking as the War on Terror does on anxiety. Still, as bad environmental news continues to match ongoing physical and economic deterioration visible everywhere, awareness of the limits of industrial enterprise have become acute and we are back to 1970, an anno horribilis John Lennon proposed renaming Year One.

Partisans of industrial hemp and other green-futurists point to the near-miraculous handiness of this non-psychoactive cousin to cannabis, with uses in plastics, packaging, construction, clothing, wood-pulp and biofuel. These glassy-eyed utopians have proven remarkably successful in convincing hard-headed farmers and bucolic libertarians in Kentucky, Michigan, South Dakota and elsewhere to unite in attempts to legalize cultivation. Results have been meager, but their efforts appear to be less product of the long countercultural march through the national mores than the first tentative steps toward a way out of the post-industrial impasse America has reached before any other country.

Indeed, the stuff I’ve been smoking of late gives the lie to the myth of American sloth and ineptitude. Tribute to some unknown Cali hydroponist’s illegal art, this is thick, rancorous-smelling booj lightly bristling with purple fuzz, a last chunk wedging with difficulty into the hollow of a pipe already packed with the baggie’s last sweepings. Application of flame soon kindles an un-Bushian fire in the mind and I can see the broad swaths of hemp verdantly rolling over the former Rust Belt. Acres of greenhouse cultivation spread across the inside of my eyelids, all tended by resettled urbanites grown fat and prosperous as so many nosering Babbitts. Traditional Open Door trade policy will push U.S. strains of marihooch into the eager lungs of all humanity and a cheeba-based dollar will reign supreme over an increasingly blissed and distracted global market.

This Earth Day, I urge Americans to toke for a better tomorrow.

Buy More Now

Of $8,500 sheets and organic cocaine

~ By Coco Tanaka ~

Ted Turner’s daughter wants to enlighten me on greening my home, and I might let her, if only she didn’t own $8,500 sheets. The environmental activist’s Atlanta home (her ecomanor, she calls it) recently landed in the “green issue” of décor-porn Domino magazine, and it is indeed a bastion of sustainable floors, recycled countertops and nontoxic paint — all 6,200 square feet of it.

I don’t care if those sheets are ecologically sensitive (as they claim to be, minus specifics on how) or custom-made by magical fair-labor elves; hearing the Heal Mother Earth message from a mogul’s scion who spends a small fortune on bedding grinds my gears to a halt, as does the same magazine’s feature on “100 Easy Ways to Go Green at Home,” all of which involve shelling out for stone plates, flue-less fireplaces and chemical-free lingerie (along with global warming and pesticides, my bras are apparently killing me). I threw the issue away. That’s right: I didn’t even recycle it.

Such backlash is booming in the wake of green consumerism, the terribly misguided idea that climate change can begin with a shopping spree. I am among the 35 million Americans who literally bought into the hype, swapping my perfectly good crap for other crap because it claimed to be earth-friendly, nontoxic or 100 percent organic (StuffWhitePeopleLike.com shrewdly noted the yuppie obsession with all-natural propaganda: “It’s almost guaranteed that if some Colombian drug lord can start offering ‘organic’ cocaine, he’ll be the richest guy ever”). Like the Catholic Church selling indulgences, companies smartly capitalized on our quick-fix naiveté and desperation to undo our sins: Everything from mattresses and sex toys to bleach and motor oil was suddenly labeled biodegradable, edible, aiding Rwandan orphans. I think it was when British Petroleum reinvented itself as Beyond Petroleum, changing its logo (from an oil-blackened duck or whatever) to a cheery sunflower, that I realized I’d been had. Al Gore warned us against such false idols. I can see through the eco-initiatives of Hummer, Exxon and Clorox, but in a world where only the stupidest or laziest corporations don’t make an effort to jump on the bandwagon, telling the earth-friendly from the greenwashed faux has gotten a little sticky.

Watchdog collective CorpWatch is there to help, defining greenwashing as “the phenomena of socially and environmentally destructive corporations, attempting to preserve and expand their markets or power by posing as friends of the environment.” I define it as “lying.” But it’s not the Cloroxes of the world that fool me (how green can you be if you’re still testing on bunny rabbits?); it’s the wolves in pesticide-free lambswool. Chip Giller, the founder of Grist, has noted this “cosmo-izing of the green movement,” and the misconception that building a second home with green infrastructure is on par with owning one home, or that buying three pairs of organic cotton jeans might be better than buying one regular pair. Just look at this year’s L.A. Fashion Week, where self-congratulatory phrases like “eco-couture” were tossed around like confetti and the brilliantly named Green Initiative Humanitarian Fashion Show sent conscious looks down a bamboo-lined runway. On the big dogs’ side of design, American Apparel has started pushing organic tops, and fast-fashion mill H&M has launched an eco-line of its own. Irony, thy face is trendy sustainability.

Possible case in point: Environment Furniture, the stunning HD Buttercup showroom of lumberjack-masculine desks and beds whose allure is spreading through the celeb circuit. In terms of craftsmanship, price and sheer density, Environment is basically the anti-Ikea, especially when one hears the trash-into-treasure background story of each piece, hewn from wood reclaimed from Brazil. One can’t help but briefly wonder if shelling out thousands for someone’s abandoned barn, reincarnated as foyer eye candy, is an “emperor has no clothes” situation … but hey, a gorgeous bench is a gorgeous bench. The price, of course, is probably why most of us are still DIY Ikea types, throwing away another cheap bookcase every year or so. And therein lies the problem: Buying eco-friendly wares is obviously a step in the right direction, but consumption is consumption. Sustainability can’t be bought.

None of this is to say that buying eco-conscious sheets isn’t a noble and valid way to slow the destruction of the Amazon. But if you have another $8,500 lying around, the World Land Trust could use it to save 85 acres of threatened rainforest. Just a thought.