Minnesota's indigenous environmental activists

Yesterday's edition of the Star Tribune had a story about Indian rights activists say treaties give them a say on pipeline route. Let me say that I hope Honor the Earth is successful in front of the PUD or in court in their efforts to affect the Sandpiper project.

Stillwater on the St. Croix RIver   © harrington

If you pay attention to these things, corporations are too often less than responsive to our demands that they clean up the messes they make of our earth. Enbridge, which wants the new pipeline, had a 2010 pipeline burst in Michigan. They opposed completing the cleanup EPA mandated. We've learned the hard way that, twenty -five years later, the Exxon Valdez spill still isn't cleaned up. The executive at BP who was in charge during their Gulf of Mexico oil blowout has moved on but is still being paid nicely. It's all too often the rest of us who end up holding the bag, or mop, or sponge and paying the bill. It would be nice to see some productive efforts to increase corporate responsibility, even at the expense of excessive profits and executive salaries. How about if a pipeline that leaked or burst had to be taken out of service permanently? It could never be used again. I think that might enhance maintenance efforts, don't you? 

Less than five years after BP's environmental debacle in the Gulf, they're back in business there. If corporations really are "persons," shouldn't they be subject to a death penalty, or something like it, as are many real people in this world? We have to start getting serious about protecting resources we need and care about. Clean air and clean water and food must trump fossil fuels and corporate profits, if we have any common sense. Is our environment, that we depend on for clean air and water and food, worth protecting? We might start showing we really care by acting on Merwin's concerns and learning the names of some of our fellow inhabitants of earth, the trees.

worth protecting?              © harrington

Native Trees

By W. S. Merwin

Neither my father nor my mother knew   

the names of the trees   

where I was born

what is that

I asked and my

father and mother did not

hear they did not look where I pointed   

surfaces of furniture held   

the attention of their fingers   

and across the room they could watch

walls they had forgotten   

where there were no questions   

no voices and no shade

Were there trees

where they were children   

where I had not been   

I asked

were there trees in those places

where my father and my mother were born   

and in that time did

my father and my mother see them

and when they said yes it meant

they did not remember

What were they I asked what were they   

but both my father and my mother

said they never knew

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