As I mentioned in the last post, I came down into the Bay Area without much of a plan, knowing that with so much going on between the diverse and far flung communities that are part of it, I wouldn’t struggle to find the right people. Fortuitously, a climate rally around stopping trains carrying crude oil was planned for Saturday morning in Richmond so after a transcendent waffle breakfast with my hosts, Ian and Molly, I drove down to see what anti-fossil fuel organizing looks like here. In certain ways, events like this look the same across the country, but it’s clear that the intersections between poverty, racism, immigration, economics, and the environment are well understood and integrated in the movement here. I arrived close to the beginning of the rally, just in time to hear a powerful spoken word piece from a local female emcee, whose name I vow to track down and share with you along with the audio of her piece on justice.
Speakers included a registered nurse who’s seen the health effects of living near the refineries and other infrastructure of the extraction and shipping corridor that cuts through Richmond, an elderly (and absolutely badass) Laotian immigrant grandmother who spoke about her concerns and promised that if the industry doesn’t listen, she will bring the ruckus to them and tear out the tracks by her house, organizers from Forest Ethics and the Sierra Club, a local pastor tying the environment to his religious mission and community, and a representative from APEN (Asian Pacific Environmental Network). Beyond the speakers, there were Wobblies tabling, a group called System Change Not Climate Change which promotes eco-socialism, students, and many other individuals. Once I edit the audio, you can hear some of the speeches that were given there.
As I hoped, the rally was a good entry point to learn more about the scene here and the ways that different groups working interact with one another. I was invited to join a contingent from the rally for lunch nearby and had so many good conversations about the work that people are doing, the disagreements within the movement, and the ways people collaborate despite those differences. I also found out about a huge spoken word and poetry event happening in Uptown Oakland, Beast Crawl, from some of the kind and generous people I met at the rally and decided to check it out. I ended up choosing the showcase from Punk Hostage Press, mostly poets out of L.A. at a sweet little punk rock bar called The Golden Bull that reminded me of Mootsy’s in Spokane with an Oakland flavor. I recorded a few poems, but mostly just relished the chance to relax and meet random and interesting people, some of whom participated in my portrait project. I must say, that while the scene here seems great, it’s no match for Spokane’s beautiful poetry scene in terms of content, crowd, and sheer determination (a difficult quality to find in poets, no offense guys.).
I headed home pretty early to work on editing and set up interviews for the following day with some of the people I’d been in touch with and met at the rally. I first headed to Emeryville to meet Rydra, one of the two hosts of Free Radical Radio for a quick interview. We met at Arizmendi, one of a handful of worker-owned bakeries in their Bay Area chain. I don’t know if it’s the lack of a boss there or not, but I had a great and desperately needed cup of coffee there.
We headed to Rydra’s warehouse studio, a set up that I would love to attempt to replicate in some corner of post-industrial Spokane someday, to talk about the podcast, the focus on ideas and theory over strategy, their critique on organizing, and much more in an interview you can hear here soon. We had talked over email beforehand and I explained the way I tend to gloss over some of my more polarizing ideas in service of keeping a diverse audience and landing certain guests, an approach that Free Radical Radio definitely eschews in favor of standing their ground and letting people meet them where they are. You can hear that full interview here in the next week or so. T
hat balance is something I think about a lot and will likely be exploring more overtly in the podcast as I interview all types of people, some of whom I agree with more than others. That disorienting place is where learning happens though, and that’s the good news.
From there, I had planned to head to the Castro to meet up with David Braun, an anti-fracking activist who I met at the Richmond rally the previous day. What should have been a 30 minute drive turned into an epic traffic jam on I-80, which gave me plenty of time to contemplate how illogical and frustrating our structures of civilization are, a fitting follow up from my talk with Rydra. While I like this area a lot in certain ways, it’s definitely more dense, crowded, and car-centric than anywhere I’d like to really live. Sitting in an unfathomable line of cars, moving forward 3 feet at a time, pouring out toxins into the air in view of stacks upon stacks of shipping containers full of all of the trappings of modern life sitting at the docks was not how I planned spending 90 minutes of my afternoon, but it is just part of what we’re dealing with at this point in our human journey. It’s all so optional and whether we choose it or not, most of those aspects of life are not long for this world due to sheer depletion.
When I finally made it into the city, I met up with David, who had just come from a fundraising kickball game that pitted the religious right against a team of drag queens (see what you miss when you’re stuck in traffic?!) and he agreed to sit down with me and talk about his work against fracking, first in New York state where he was part of the organizing effort that succeeded in banning the practice there, and now in California where Californians Against Fracking is working to accomplish that goal on a second U.S. coast. His energy around this issue is powerful and he also shared a great summary of the science of why fracking is so much more dangerous than conventional drilling. You can hear that interview on this week’s Praxis show (Saturday at 4:00 PM) and in full here once it’s edited.
I could spend weeks here in the Bay exploring the niche political scenes and convergent issues, but have a tight schedule. It’s good to have made so many new connections here and to know that there are many yet to make. It’s a beautiful, ugly mess of a place and I’m pretty fond of it. I drove south and east into the Central Valley and watched the heat rise and the landscape shift into one more familiar, like so many of the agricultural areas in Eastern Washington in some ways. I hope that the hospitality and openness that I found here continues to find me as I wind my way east and finally north again during this long drive.
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