Occupying For Sustainability
By Winnie As Told To Stacy Lanyon
22 August, 2012
At The Heart of Occupation Blog
Frack Attack, July 28, 2012, Washington DC Photo: Stacy Lanyon
I've been waiting my whole life for this to happen. It seemed like a very natural, organic evolution of all of the work I’d been doing leading up to it. I’m a blogger and a filmmaker and an activist. I have a medium sized blog. The blog was started in April of 2010 in response to what I was experiencing as climate change in a really real way. I started noticing that things were not right. Everything was off, and I started to examine why this was happening. I decided to start a blog, and the blog really focused a lot on climate change, on transition economies, on peak oil, on big agriculture, on just the monoculture and just how wrong it all is. That was really the focus of my energy in 2010 and 2011.
I had heard about Occupy through Adbusters. I got a hashtag sent to me. I showed up on the morning of September 17th with a photographer, and we didn’t know what to expect, and we never left. We just stayed. We showed up at 9:15 in the morning. Wall Street, which was the site of the original occupation, was completely barricaded by policemen, and there were about forty activists. It was a group of activists from around the world. They were all out front. Then, we marched to Bowling Green, to the Native American Museum. We had our first rally there. From there, we marched to Zuccotti Park, and we just never left until we were evicted.
The world that we live in now is just not sustainable. We can’t continue to live in this current paradigm. It’s not sustainable. It is going to come down whether we bring it down or the forces of nature bring it down. It’s extremely important to examine why it isn’t working. I think that Occupy really does this. In the movement, there are so many brilliant people around New York City, as well as around the globe, that are aware that we just can’t continue to live this way, fundamentally because it’s unsustainable. Capitalism is unsustainable. It’s very simple. We can talk about banks. We can talk about mortgages. We can talk about student debt. We can talk about all of this until we are blue in the face, but we cannot have infinite growth on a planet with finite resources. We just can’t. Every time we make a new batch of televisions or toasters or refrigerators, we’re taking something natural and making something unnatural, and we can’t continue to do this. It’s that simple. I think the effects of what we are all feeling in the climate, and to a lesser extent, in the economy is because it's all tied in together. There is nothing mutually exclusive going on in any way. This is why it’s really important to occupy this cycle of insatiable consumption.
The occupation draws so many different types of people who have ideas, who have boundless creativity and also scientific solutions. People will look at Occupy from the outside, from the way the mainstream media will portray us and say, “Well gosh, these people have no idea. They’re just a bunch of dirty protestors, and they’re holding up signs, and they’re doing all this, and they’re not really changing anything,” but that’s just not true. We’ll come at it from the perspective of progressive politics. You now have Elizabeth Warren adopting the language of Occupy in all of her speeches, “Corporations aren’t people. Corporations don’t live. They don’t dance. They don’t have heart. They don’t get married. They don’t die.” Arguably, they do die, but she is using these words in her campaign speeches, in her ads. It’s the same thing with the president and every other progressive politician out there. They’ve adopted the language of Occupy, so if this movement were irrelevant, we wouldn’t have inspired these people to adopt this language. That’s one aspect of it.
Another aspect is that you just hear it everywhere. The general public is talking about Stop & Frisk. It was a march that happened one day. The first Stop & Frisk march happened in Harlem in October. Now, it’s June of 2012, and it’s become a national issue. That’s definitely as a result of Occupy. Occupy is growing. It isn’t irrelevant. It’s growing. It’s just growing horizontally, and that’s something that people don’t get because they are still stuck in this old paradigm of a non-cooperative existence, a non-cooperative education system, a non-cooperative economic system, a non-cooperative food production system. It just goes on and on. Occupy, for all of its squabbling and all of it’s in-fighting and for all of the things that are not perfect, is effective. I think that you only have to look at the language that is being used by the general public to accept that this movement has completely taken hold and is just going to continue to expand.
Whether or not we’ll come to any government institution with elected officials, that’s another story. That’s a story that I think the media would prefer to try and focus on. “Oh, I think this movement isn’t relevant because they haven’t been able to produce sixty-two elected delegates to the House like the Tea Party has." It’s because we don’t want to right now. Do you honestly think that if I wanted to be a House representative that I wouldn’t be qualified for the job? Certainly, I would be. I could have anybody’s job actually, certainly in the environmental department because I’m a permaculture designer as well, so I’m certainly qualified to take a job at the Environmental Protection Agency or in the House, but it’s not what I want to do.
You’re interviewing me as an organizer for Occupy, and even though my skill set, my core strengths are in environmental studies and also in permaculture design, what I’m doing for the occupation is really media oriented. This is an example of people not understanding how horizontal this movement and it's participants have become. I think this is something that’s very, very much a core strength of many of the occupiers involved. They are very hotizontalist people. They can wear many hats. They can work in media, but they can also do organizing. The organizers are very, very flexible, and the movement continues to grow in a horizontal way. Like an oil spill. LOL.
I hope it will bring about a world that is equitable for all species, humans and all living species, one that is sustainable, one that practices the permaculture principles that I hold so dear, which are people care, planet care and share the resources. That’s fundamentally a cooperative way of looking at things. That’s ultimately what I hope will happen. I don’t know if it will. I’m optimistic. It’s very simple. They’re very simple practices to comprehend –care about people, care about the planted, and share what you have, share your resources and start to examine what natural resources are, start redefining what the public’s notion of resources are, and help people re-direct their value systems. It is culture that influences our value systems. If we don’t start changing that culture than people will continue to value things that are not natural resources. They’ll continue to value clothing and cars and jewelry and all the things that are not real. That’s the kind of world I want to live in, a world where people will wake up and say, “Hey, what am I valuing here? I value water. I value food. I value nature. I value friendships. I value my family. I value love. I value compassion.” We want to change the way people think, and I do actually think that’s happening.
I think that when you watch TV, you see a lot of people who are trapped in that old way of thinking. If you don’t watch TV and you see what’s happening on the internet, you start seeing this really ultra positive culture that’s occurring on Facebook and other areas on the internet. It’s really positive and inspiring and motivational even. We’re really entering an realm of consciousness that has not been experienced in the last fifty years, hyperconsciousness if you will. I’d like for people to be able to temper some of that consciousness and start applying their new knowledge into creating new systems, systems that I think many of the working groups at Occupy are working on, everything from worker owed cooperatives to localizing the food systems by supporting urban agriculture projects, bringing ecology into the cities, constantly keeping vigilant on the banks and holding them and the corporations accountable.
I guess I just want a world that’s balanced and sane and compassionate and one where we value nature over profit. We’re profiting from nature. That’s really what it’s about. That’s what people don’t really quite understand, that every dollar that corporations make in profit is directly as a result of ecocide or absolute exploitation of nature, and until we start acknowledging this and understanding it to be the true problem, we’re not going to make too much headway. That said, I DO think that awareness is growing and that change is finally happening. I hope that we can live in a world that values nature over profit.
You can view Winnie's blog at http://www.seismologik.com
Stacy Lanyon is a social, animal and environmental rights activist who has been photographing Occupy Wall Street actions and events since October 2011. Her blog “At the Heart of an Occupation” profiles those involved in the movement in order to get to the heart of why they think this movement is so important and what kind of world they hope to help bring about. Read more Occupy stories at the http://attheheartofanoccupation.blogspot.in
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