Wetlands Works May / June 2001
Police Escort Bear out of STAPLES Store As He Pleads With Customers for Help
Police escorted an activist dressed as a bear out of a lower Manhattan Staples store at lunchtime on June 11, after the “bear” appealed to customers to save him by urging Staples to carry more recycled paper with higher recycled content.
Only 12% of Staples’ paper is recycled, most of it originating from forests in the area containing the greatest number of endangered species in the U.S., the southeast (according to the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service).
Some of Staples’ product line is extracted from the public’s National Forests, and even America’s rainforest in the Pacific Northwest, where 1000-year-old Douglas Firs are destroyed to manufacture paper.
“It is unconscionable that the largest and fastest growing office superstore in the world claims it cannot increase its offering of recycled paper from a mere 12% of its entire stock, and claims it cannot increase its paper’s recycled content above 30% post-consumer,“ states Mark LeStrange, of the Activism Center at Wetlands Preserve.
The demands of the campaign are:
Immediately phase out all wood and paper products made from old growth fiber.
Immediately phase out all wood and paper products made from fiber from U.S. public lands.
Commit to achieving 50% post-consumer content for all paper products within two years and begin an immediate phase out of all products that are made of 100% virgin wood fiber.
Make available 100% post-consumer paper and paper that is made from agricultural fiber in all stores and other points of sale.
Educate all employees, customers and suppliers on the benefits of recycled paper, recycling, alternative fibers, and healthy forest resources.
After almost two years of ignoring environmentalists’ attempts to contact them and then failing to make any commitment during negotiations, Staples was targeted by 75 groups across the U.S. Wetlands’ June demonstration marks our joining of this national campaign.
Protest in Solidarity with the U’wa People
The international campaign in support of the U'wa people has recently been calling on Sanford Bernstein/Alliance Capitol to divest from Occidental Petroleum. This comes on the heels of a successful campaign that pressured Fidelity Investments, another top shareholder of the company and world's largest mutual fund, to divest from Oxy.
On April 26th, the National Day of Action for Indigenous Sovereignty and Justice, more than 50 protesters brought the U'wa's concerns directly to the front door of the Bernstein/Alliance headquarters in midtown Manhattan. Roberto Perez, President of the Traditional Authority of the U’wa, joined forces with a number of other indigenous leaders-- including John Benally of the Dineh people at Black Mesa, Arizona; Juan Gualinga of the Sarayacu community of Ecuador's rainforest; and others from Peru, Mexico and North Dakota-- to challenge the financial institutions that profit from the extraction of resources from native lands.
A flowing 15 ft. "Angry Spirit" puppet towered ominously over drummers pounding warnings upon Oxy Oil barrels at the entrance to the Trump Building, where Alliance/ Bernstein is located. Activists attempted to deliver a letter from the U'wa to Sanford
Bernstein but were denied entrance. Instead, the company sent a representative to meet with Mr. Perez who presented the letter denouncing Oxy's drilling and Bernstein's financial backing of the project and demanding that they divest from Oxy. A crowd gathered around the demonstration and Mr. Perez articulated his story and the corporation's legacy of shame.
Earth First! NYC Gathering
In the belly of the beast, New York City (NYC), a handful of folks organized the first ever Earth First! regional rendezvous in an urban center to focus on radical ecology and urban living. Though many don't admit it, they spend a great deal of time outside of the forest and even in large cities. This gathering was an attempt to highlight rampant environmental racism, failures of urban planning, and to bring disparate communities together, bioregionally, to further radicalize both young white activists and people of color in the communities that feel the brunt of urban environmental blight. The gathering was organized to take people around the city to see its green spaces, hold workshops and celebrate public space.
The gathering began in the Green Dome Garden, a community garden in Brooklyn. Just a block away a demolished paint factory has lead content in the soil 10 times the legal limit. Luckily for this predominately Puerto Rican community, the gardeners were not so slow in taking action. They chose plants that help to trap lead and other toxins. After a composting workshop, the EF! crew moved to the East Riverfront where a row of abandoned warehouses and derelict piers have rewilded into a stretch of free space, with a do-it-yourself rubble-constructed skate park amid the husks of torched cars and covert shanties. A snapping turtle slowly cruised by without altercation. During the evening in Brooklyn, we went to Eco Books for workshops on the animal liberation campaign against Huntingdon Life Sciences, Car Busters' call for a car-free city and Rainforest Relief's direct action campaign to stop the use of tropical rainforest hardwoods in the city's benches, boardwalks and bridges. Late that night we cruised through the Jamaica Bay wildlife refuge by subway and emerged on Far Rockaway beach for a bonfire and camped out on the edge of the city, unmolested.
Next was a day in the Project Harmony garden in Harlem, as well as a tour of green spaces and creeping gentrification. In a short walk we saw 11 empty buildings on the same streets as four bulldozed gardens. When the bulldozers came for Project Harmony, a brave soul climbed a tall tree and stopped the destruction for the day. Now a court order protects the remaining 500 gardens, but the stay of execution could be lifted at any time. These gardens are living proof of a community empowering itself to take back its land from landlord arson, drug dealing, refuse and city neglect to create safe green spaces for children, elderly people and those who can't afford summer homes and vacations outside the city smog. We held a workshop on environmental racism in the prison industrial complex. The issues of prisons and the environment don't often come up together, but the increased prison construction and privatization is uniting these struggles. Some people have tried to use environmental laws as a way to fight prison building. The impacts of instantly transplanting 2,000-plus people, with increased sewage and waste disposal, are disastrous. The prisons are often built over smaller productive farmlands or wildlands, destroying food, habitat and watersheds. Who is in jail? Predominately people of color. Almost everyone in the neighborhood was impacted in some way by the prison industrial complex. Haja, co-founder of Project Harmony, spent some time in prison and was politicized inside: "A prison is a microcosm of the larger society." Later in the evening we breached the fence surrounding the half of Project Harmony that was destroyed and began replanting it with donated plants and seeds. After this, we joined a moonlight critical mass through Central Park to end our day uptown.
On our agenda for the next day was the Lower East Side of Manhattan, mecca for the gardening movement and tenant and anarchist organizing in NYC. We began the morning in the Stannard Diggs, a threatened community garden, with a history of the More Gardens! Coalition and their direct action campaigns to protect and actively create new community gardens. A workshop was organized on how to deal with grand juries, due to the intense and scattershot repression in Long Island following a series of Earth Liberation Front actions. Bob Lederer, an anti-racist and ACT-UP activist, led the discussion, charting the history of activist resistance to the grand jury beginning with the Puerto Rican liberation struggle in the 1930’s through the dark days of Nixon, to his own sentencing of two and a half months during investigations into the Black Liberation Army. He argued that cooperating with the police on any level is dangerous. Next we had an anti-sexist workshop for men. This is a developing movement in the activist community in NYC. We created a safe space for people to speak openly about our own sexist behavior and develop creative solutions for destroying sexism, not only in our society but also in our movement and in ourselves. We moved to another threatened garden, La Plaza Cultural, for a large-scale play organized by college students, gardeners and youth activists from all over the city. Climbing trainings went on in magnificent willow trees that crown the community space. We ended the evening with music and festivities in a squat just down the block.
Our final planned day was spent in the South Bronx, one of the poorest communities in the US; hit hard by pollution from highways, waste transfer stations, sewage treatment plants, incinerator smoke and power plants; but also home to more than 100 community gardens, countless lots gone wild and community driven restoration of city parks and marinas. In a small inlet next to the largest scrap metal yard in NYC is the restored Hunt's Point Riverside Park on the Bronx River. We navigated it in a boat built by local high school students. We rowed the length of the mammoth Hunt's Point Market, where more than 20,000 trucks per day drop food from far away. The market is dubbed the worst ecological disaster in the city. We navigated the rotting skeletons of pier pilings getting sucked back to the depths by a renewed burst of gribbles and shipworms. Riker's Island prison and a monolith steel prison barge, opened for overflow in Mayor Giuliani's time, came into view near a break in the seawall where cordgrass flourishes despite decades of subjugation. Throughout the day, the Cherry Tree Association hosted a restoration of a marina reclaimed from city neglect. The NYPD sometimes uses the space as a firing range and it is adjacent to a brand new power plant construction site. Stiff competition, but squatting land was never easy. We ended the evening cooking over an open fire in the Cherry Tree Garden and listening to Dr. Makiewicz of environmental disaster or an incredible opportunity spitting usin the face. We don't need to abandon the city, we need to rebuild it. " Case in point is the landfill from subway excavations that went into the Harlem River and is now a fully restored salt march, a stone's throw away from where the Dutch conned the natives out of their island. Now it is home to great blue herons, snowy egrets, big cordgrass and fiddler crabs. A healthy salt marsh feeds the entire estuary ecosystem surrounding NYC. Salt marshes are among the mostproductive ecosystems on the planet, nurturing fiddler crabs, ribbedmussels and microscopic plants and animals.
The next day a group of activists paid a surprise visit to the NYC offices of Governor George Pataki. We were kept out, so two individuals blockaded the rush hour traffic while supporters performed acrobatic stunts forming a human-constructed windmill. This was a protest against the construction of 10 power plants in poor communities in NYC. The quasi-public New York Power Authority (NYPA) pushed through the plan, just below the size requiring a full Environmental Impact Review which would have forced public comment and appropriate biological studies. The plants will emit thousands of tons of sulfur dioxide, carbon monoxide, particulate matter, nitrogen oxides and volatile organic compounds such as benzopyrenes and formaldehyde per year. The construction is being rushed to pre-empt court cases that have already been filed. The NYPA has installed solar cells at other sites. There is no shortage of electricity; there is a shortage of common sense.
In the week following the gathering there was a huge rally to save community gardens and a protest to end the bombing in Vieques at the United Nations with 28 people arrested.
For more information visit the following websites: More Gardens! Coalition Coalition; Gaia Institute. ; and New York City Indymedia.
Critical Mass Ride for the Rainforest
The rainforest arm of Wetlands has been quite busy. We're continuing to target New York City’s on-going usage of rainforest wood for benches, boardwalks, piers and subway tracks. Recently, we combined the monthly Critical Mass; an event in which hundreds of cyclists and skaters take to the streets in a roving fiesta to demand safer, more accessible alternative transportation; with rainforest issues and dubbed the evening a "Dead Rainforest Tour." Along the route large colorful banners were deployed at sites where the city has built or continues to build with rainforest wood. The ride ended with a takeover of the Staten Island ferry (piers made of rainforest wood): cyclists were met with a 16-piece band and a fire breathers as commuters danced to the rhythms.
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