natural resistance
BY MARY O’BRIEN
Good Laws
Some legislation spurs innovation
I
f it hadn’t been for a handful of national
laws that required Eugene to pause in its
headlong rush to build the West Eugene
Parkway, trucks and cars would almost cer-
tainly be roaring, at this moment, on a four-
lane highway through and above our rare,
public wetlands in west Eugene.
But the Endangered Species Act required
us to help two plants and a butterfl y that 1) live
in the path of the then- proposed highway and 2)
are near extinction due to destruction of their habitat
in their only home, the Willamette Valley.
The Clean Water Act required us to show why there were no less drastic
alternatives to destroying portions of these wetlands that are among the last 0.5
percent not already destroyed in the Willamette Valley.
The National Environmental Policy Act required us to ask our west Eugene
transportation questions broadly enough to at least consider alternatives to building
the highway straight through the wetlands.
In part because these national laws were looming over the parkway idea, a two-
year, collaborative effort by government, business, neighborhood and conservation
representatives is now rethinking how lands can better be used to benefi t west
Eugene’s environment, transportation, business and neighborhoods. Good laws
have spurred innovation.
Would that El Paso, Texas, were so lucky. They, like Eugene, are trying to restore
a fragment of wetlands. As in the Willamette Valley, wetlands have been nearly
extinguished along the Rio Grande River due to farm, ranch, industrial and urban
developments. Their “West Eugene Wetlands” is the Rio Bosque Wetlands Park. At
372 acres, it’s much smaller than ours, but equally special to them.
Unfortunately, El Paso is a border town, and the Bush administration has been
in a headlong rush to build its Berlin-type wall separating Mexico from the U.S. If
the administration were following our nation’s laws, much of the wall wouldn’t be
being built in wilderness areas, national monuments and wildlife refuges; through
archaeological sites; on tribal reservations; across the path of migrating rare and
endangered species … or through El Paso’s wetlands.
However, not wanting to be bothered with developing sustainable Mexico-U.S.
economic and immigration policies, Congress ponied up for the Bush administration.
In the Real ID Act, Congress gave one person, the secretary of Homeland Security,
dictator-like authority to waive all laws that might stand in the way of erecting our
nation’s Berlin Wall. On April 3, 2008, Homeland Secretary Chertoff waived 35
federal laws and all related state, local and tribal laws standing in his way
And thus it was that I came to be walking at dawn on Dec. 4 on a levee at the
edge of the Rio Bosque Wetlands Park with Judy Ackerman, recently retired from
her decades-long career with the National Guard. At fi rst glance, the park doesn’t
look like much: It’s being restored from a patch of abandoned land, as mitigation
for straightening other parts of the Rio Grande River. It’s got a lot of weeds. It
needs to be given more water to allow the planted native riparian plants to cloak
the restored creek meander and wetlands. But a park restoration plan developed by
the city, University of Texas and El Paso citizens is being implemented by scientists
and volunteers. Rare native birds are returning. Birdwatchers, school classes and
families are walking and soaking up this special world of wetlands and riverside life.
Just as in west Eugene’s wetlands.
But as of December, El Paso’s park and its wildlife are now being cut off from
the Rio Grande River by wall construction. Immense earth-moving equipment
is rumbling. A Border Patrol car drives up, asking us what we are doing. Within
minutes, four more Border Patrol cars cruise by. Stephanie Herweck, an activist
for alternatives to the wall elsewhere in Texas, breaks into tears of frustration at
watching one more stretch of border area being torn apart by The Wall. I hear birds
faintly in the wetlands below.
I also hear some of the words Barack Obama uttered in his July 24, 2008, speech
in Berlin:
The walls between the countries with the most and those with the least
cannot stand. … The walls between … natives and immigrants ... cannot
stand. These now are the walls we must tear down.
We trash our laws to erect walls at our nation’s peril. Perhaps next we waive
laws to extract oil from shale in our Southwest wilderness. Or to override Oregon’s
law restraining the construction of nuclear power plants. All in the name of anti-
terrorism, or reduction of dependency on foreign oil, or perhaps for so-called
“green infrastructure.”
We must quit doing this. We need our laws to force us to rethink our relationship
with Mexico and our planet. To remain democratic. To be civilized.
Resist.
Mary O’Brien of Eugene has worked as a public interest scientist since 1981. She can be reached at mob@efn.org
letters
TO THE EDITOR
STOP THE ATTACKS
Israeli Defense Forces have struck the
Gaza Strip, killing or wounding hundreds
and continuing the cycle of violence. There
is limited value in debating how it began.
But perspectives differ.
Israel and the U.S. claim Israel is
defending its right to exist and protect
itself from rocket attacks by terrorists.
Israeli peace activists claim Israel
broke the truce with Hamas with a raid
on the night of the U.S. elections and has
continued “calculated raids and killings,
whenever the shooting of missiles on
Israel decreased.”
Critics even charge the Israeli
government is playing politics with the
tragedy, calling Ehud Barak’s declaration
that he is stopping the elections campaign
to concentrate on the Gaza offensive “a
joke.” “The war in Gaza is itself Barack’s
elections campaign,” says Gush Shalom
spokesperson Adam Keller, “a cynical
attempt to buy votes with the blood and
suffering” of Israelis in the cities targeted
by rockets and of Palestinians in Gaza.
An April 2008 Vanity Fair article
claims the U.S. plotted a coup against the
democratically elected Hamas govern-
ment, triggering the Hamas takeover of
Gaza.
The Israeli blockade of Gaza is
causing immense suffering and has been
called “collective punishment,” a war crime
under the 1949 Geneva Conventions.
The
U.S.
should
initiate urgent diplomacy to reinstate a
cease fi re, end all military operations,
stop the attacks on Israel and lift the
Gaza blockade. This would serve the best
interests of Israel, the Palestinian people
and the U.S.
Robert Roth
Eugene
SHOCKING GAZA
Valori George (letters, 12/18) raises
important questions. Why have we heard
4 JANUARY 8, 2009
EUGENE WEEKLY
so much for so long about the Nazi
genocide and so little about the brutal
Nakba committed by Zionist terrorists
against the largely helpless Palestinians
in 1948, which has continued under the
radar for 60 years until today’s outrageous
imprisonment of 1.5 million people in
Gaza?
Dr. Jeff Halper, director of the Israeli
Committee Against House Demolitions
(www.icahd.org), who recently spoke
in Eugene, describes the Israeli “ware-
housing” of Palestinians as a key element
in “disaster capitalism” related by Naomi
Klein in her book The Shock Doctrine. This
method of containing and progressively
erasing “surplus humanity” reliably
produces an outlook of helplessness and
hopelessness in the captive and deprived
population, an outlook long noted by
psychotherapists in clinical depression
Psychologist Martin Seligman has
demonstrated the development of “learned
helplessness” in laboratory animals
subjected to conditions where they
could neither predict nor control events
of importance in their environments,
producing behavior in other species
analogous to depression in humans.
When your lands are arbitrarily stolen,
your homes arbitrarily bulldozed, your
olive groves arbitrarily uprooted and your
children and brothers arbitrarily murdered
with no legal recourse, you will learn abject
helplessness through unspeakably violent
lessons. Veteran war correspondent Chris
Hedges reports that in no other armed
confl ict has he ever witnessed snipers
deliberately target unarmed children as do
Israeli soldiers.
Gaza is an intentional disaster, and it is
unsurprising that more than 50 percent of
Gazan children under the age of 12 have
been found to have no will to live.
Jack Dresser
Springfi eld
EDITOR’S NOTE: This letter, and the next, were
submitted before the Israeli attack on Gaza.
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